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The role of debt in episodes of financial stability is a topic of increasing important as the global economy struggles to recover from the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mortgage finance booms of the 1920s and 2000s as natural experiments, new insights into debt-driven financial crises are gained.

The general methodology is interpreting anomalous historical events as natural experiments. The specific methodology is the approach to natural experiments provided by Joseph A. Schumpeter and Milton Friedman. The hypothesis tested is that laxity in lending standards was the prime contributor to the mortgage debt booms. In each case, we explain why factors other than laxity in lending standards would be secondary factors, with the pre-boom and post-boom lending standards providing the control groups of natural experiments. The two episodes of mortgage debt booms occurring under very different general economic and financial conditions provide an especially strong test of the hypothesized functional relationship.

The results of the two natural experiments support the hypothesis that lax lending standards were the prime contributors to the two episodes of debt-driven financial crisis.

From a social economics perspective, the insights gained are important because a major social goal has been to encourage greater opportunities for home ownership. The results of these natural experiments provide guidance for policymakers in the search for a viable balance between achieving that social goal and maintaining financial stability.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss methodology issues in menu-labelling experiments in commercial full-service restaurants, and to investigate how the menu description and price affects customers’ choice of an organic veal entrée in a Norwegian restaurant.

A menu-labelling experiment was conducted in a fine-dining restaurant during ordinary opening hours over a period of two weeks. The menu description of an organic veal entrée was altered repeatedly and the effect of these changes on the sales of this entrée was investigated.

Adding words to the menu description, such as “organic”, or describing animal welfare had a very limited effect on customers’ choices in the restaurant.

The research illustrates the use of a natural field experiment in a commercial full-service restaurant and discusses strengths and weaknesses of the methodology.

Few experiments have been performed on the effect on credence attributes in commercial full-service restaurants and there is little knowledge about research challenges in menu-labelling experiments. This paper contributes to the knowledge on both issues by conducting a natural field experiment in a fine-dining restaurant.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic methodological review of the application of field experiments in the domain of marketing research. By performing this study, the authors seek to offer necessary advice and suggestions to marketing scholars interested in the application of field experiments and to promote the adoption of field experiments as a preferred methodological choice among scholars in this domain.

A total of 315 field experiments published in the ten leading marketing journals in the past five decades were analyzed in this systematic methodological review. This study examines various aspects of field experiments, including the research profile of existing research, different trends and topics related to field experiments, choice of research questions, methods of observations, unobtrusive data collection, types of interventions and outcome variables.

This study identified various trends and topics, categories of manipulations, types of limitations and important considerations in designing field experiments and offered necessary advice on the future of field experiments in marketing research.

This study provides a complete roadmap for future marketing scholars to adopt field studies in their research plans. The systematic summary of limitations and the checklist will be helpful for the researchers to design and execute field studies more effectively and efficiently.

This review study offers a complete roadmap for marketing scholars who are interested in adopting field experiments in their research projects. The discussion of trends and topics, manipulations, limitations, design considerations and checklist items for field experiments offers relevant insights to marketing scholars and may help them design and execute field experiments more effectively and efficiently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive methodological review of field experiments published in leading marketing journals throughout the past five decades. This study makes novel and unique contributions to both theory and literature on field experiments in the marketing discipline.

During the Greenspan‐Bernanke era, the responses of Federal Reserve officials to financial crises resulted in an extraordinary involvement of the US central bank in the non‐banking financial sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the informal and evolving conceptual framework that allows Federal Reserve officials to pursue a strategy of “constrained discretion” in responding to financial disturbances.

Behavioural economics relies on designed psychological and economic experiments to predict behavioural biases at the group level. As an analogue applicable to understanding biases in the intuitive judgments of individual policymakers, a naïve behavioural economics approach relies on intuitive or naive psychology and the interpretation of historical events as natural experiments to explain why intuitive judgments of Federal Reserve officials will contain biases.

Under the Greenspan‐Bernanke conceptual framework, Federal Reserve officials exercise “constrained discretion” in responding to disturbances arising from macro structural changes in the financial sector. The two key concepts are the Greenspan‐Bernanke doctrine on how the Federal Reserve officials respond to financial asset price bubbles and their collapses, and Bernanke's financial accelerator. Several examples are cited in which policy errors made by Alan Greenspan were attributable to identifiable biases in his intuitive judgment. In addition, Bernanke's response to the financial crisis of 2007‐2009 was based on his interpretation of the Great Depression as a natural experiment. But that interpretation was heavily biased by the influence of Milton Friedman on Bernanke's intuitive judgment. While Federal Reserve officials will need to exercise discretionary judgment in responding to financial crises, the potential for errors due to biases in that judgment can be reduced through regulatory reforms that lessen the potential for financial crises to occur.

While quantitative analyses of the effects of the Federal Reserve's actions on non‐bank financial institutions and the financial markets are ongoing, little attention has been given to the psychological aspects of the intuitive judgment that influences the discretionary decisions of the policymakers.

This paper aims to investigate inferences consumers make about organic and all-natural labeled products in both food and non-food contexts using the health halo effect as a theoretical foundation.

This paper uses three experiments to test the effects of organic and all-natural labeling across three product types, food, personal hygiene and household cleaning, while controlling for environmental attitudes.

The results of the experiments in the context of food, personal hygiene and household cleaning products suggest that both organic and all-natural labeling produce halo effects. Distinct findings are presented across the three product types.

Findings indicate that consumers may make unwarranted inferences about both organic and all-natural labeled products and demonstrates that the health halo effect is a potentially robust phenomenon, pervasive across a diverse array of products. This research used a crowdsourcing platform for sample recruitment. Future research should validate the results of these experiments with other sample types.

This research suggests that consumers may make similar unwarranted inferences for diverse products bearing organic and all-natural labels. These inferences are particularly intriguing given the differing regulatory requirements for the labels

Organic and all-natural labels are ubiquitous in both food and non-food products. However, research on either label primarily exists in a food context and has not directly compared the labels. Understanding the inferences consumers make based on the labels across product types is imperative for both marketing and public policy.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the emerging field of experimental research on entrepreneurship to better understand its development and potential.

A systematic, evidence-based literature review was applied, resulting in a sample of 47 articles having used experiments in entrepreneurship research so far. The papers are analyzed according to their topic, methods, and research design, revealing insight into their limitations and prospective contributions.

The paper discusses the potential and disadvantages of experimental methods while arguing for experiments as the method of choice for answering causality questions. This study finds a persistent increase in experimental entrepreneurship research since its introduction in 1990.

The study provides research from the field of entrepreneurship with future directions, with potential research areas and an orientation for those interested in conducting experiments.

Experiments are employed in a variety of research areas and have become more and more popular in the field of entrepreneurship. No study has analyzed the experimental studies in entrepreneurship. This paper contributes by providing an overview of the field, reflecting and discussing the outcomes while characterizing the methods employed.

Based on previous inventories, the purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. The aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward.

The authors examine the current state of experimental public administration, by looking at a systematic selection of ISI ranked experimental publications in major public administration journals (1992-2014) and recommend ways forward based on this review.

The review indicates a rise in experimentation in public administration in recent years, this can be attributed mostly to some subfields of public administration. Furthermore, most experiments in public administration tend to have relatively simple designs, high experimental realism and a focus on external validity. Experimental public administration can be strengthened by increasing diversification in terms of samples, experimental designs, experimental types and substantive scope. Finally, the authors recommend to better utilize experiments to generate usable knowledge for practitioners and to replicate experiments to improve scientific rigour.

This paper contributes to experimental public administration by drawing on a systematic selection of papers and assessing them in depth. By means of a transparent and systematic selection of publications, various venues or ways forward are presented.

Prior research has extensively examined how bringing technology from work into the non-work life domain creates conflict, yet the reverse pathway has rarely been studied. The purpose of this study is to bridge this gap and examine how the non-work use of smartphones in the workplace affects work–life conflict.

Drawing from three literature streams: technostress, work–life conflict and role boundary theory, the authors theorise on how limiting employees' ability to integrate the personal life domain into work, by means of technology use policy, contributes to stress and work–life conflict. To test this model, the authors employ a natural experiment in a company that changed its policy from fully restricting to open smartphone access for non-work purposes in the workplace. The insights gained from the experiment were explored further through qualitative interviews.

Work–life conflict declines when a ban on using smartphones for non-work purposes in the workplace is revoked. This study's results show that the relationship between smartphone use in the workplace and work–life conflict is mediated by sensed stress. Additionally, a post-hoc analysis reveals that work performance was unchanged when the smartphone ban was revoked.

First, this study advances the authors' understanding of how smartphone use policies in the workplace spill over to affect non-work life. Second, this work contributes to the technostress literature by revealing how, in specific situations, engagement with ICT can reduce distress and strain.

This study aims to systematically review a total of 513 papers using experimental methods in hospitality and tourism research and then proposed new recommendations to address approaches that have been confusingly adopted or ignored in the current literature.

An extensive literature review was conducted. Together with critiques on previous studies, four recommendations were proposed to help carry out future experimental studies using more rigorous and exact approaches.

Multiple experimental studies can provide stronger evidence for theoretical arguments. Demonstration of the theoretical underlying mechanism using evidence based on mediation and moderating methods is required. The adoption of complementary methods can mitigate the generic weaknesses of experimental methods. In addition, enhancement of the realism of experiments is required to obtain stronger empirical evidence with internal and external validity.

This study proposes four constructive recommendations which help researchers to conduct future experimental design studies correctly. Valid and exact research outcomes can help practitioners to carry out new useful marketing strategies.

After reviewing 513 previous papers that used experimental design in the hospitality and tourism fields, this study proposes four new recommendations to facilitate a better understanding of experimental design. The original and innovative nature of this study will help future investigations to adopt more accurate statistical approaches.

This study aims to draw on goal contagion theory to examine how organizations shape the pro-environmental behavior of their employees. It extends the scope of analysis beyond organizational boundaries and illustrates the external effects of organizational practices that support societal change. The fundamental research question is whether perceived environmental management practices strengthen employees’ public sphere pro-environmental behavior.

To test the research hypothesis, the authors combined survey and quasi-experimental evidence from two independent field studies. Both studies were carried out in the tourist industry in Germany. In the first study, the authors used a cross-sectional research design with data from 206 employees to examine whether perceived environmental management practices are positively associated with employees’ public sphere pro-environmental behavior. For causal inference, the authors conducted a second study involving a natural pretest-posttest quasi-experiment with a treatment and control group.

The results of the cross-sectional study revealed that perceived environmental management practices are positively associated with employees’ public sphere pro-environmental behavior. The findings of the natural quasi-experiment confirmed the hypothesized causation and minimized the probability of alternative explanations.

The study has important implications for policymakers, since the support and acceptance of public policies is a prerequisite for the realization of collective political action. By highlighting the potential of organizational practices to strengthen employees’ public sphere pro-environmental behavior, this research illustrates how rules and regulations that oblige firms to intensify their environmental protection practices might not only reduce the ecological footprint of organizations but also help cultivate societal acceptance of and support for environmental protection.

This study illustrates how employees that align their normative goals in accordance with the implicit goals of organizational practices can become agents for corresponding societal changes. This perspective highlights the integration of structure and agency and underscores the idea that societal change works across macro-, meso- and micro-social levels.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the investigation is the first that examines the relationship between perceived environmental management practices and employees’ public sphere pro-environmental behavior. Herewith, it sheds light on a thus far overlooked mechanism for how organizations stimulate societal change.