Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect

After their highly praised book Mostly Harmless Econometrics, Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke recently published a new book called Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect. This latest book is written for a somewhat different audience though. The first book was intended for more advanced practitioners of impact assessment. This new book is more introductory, explaining important issues such as counterfactuals, treatment effects and selection bias to an audience much wider than academics, particularly focussing on those who are new to these issues. Because of this wider public, the impact of this latest book might be even larger than their first bestseller. Nevertheless, also among academics there is probably a good demand for a book like this. When reading the book and writing the review I was surprised how many of my colleagues were also reading it, some of them even considering it to use in a course. One of the many strengths of Mastering ‘Metrics is the use of various cases to illustrate problems, tools and outcomes. Examples of such cases are the effect of Minimum Legal Drinking Age on death of 21 year olds, the effect of attending top colleges on future wages or the effect of tight banking policies on bank failures during the Great Depression. All chapters present one ‘metrics technique, explained using one of these case studies. This is a fresh approach compared with most ‘metrics textbooks that often first discuss the mathematics of a technique, with examples and applications often given in later paragraphs. Angrist and Pischke's lucid and intuitive approach has the advantage that readers not well-grounded in statistics and mathematics get a good feel for the problems involved in making meaningful impact assessment.