ABSTRACT
The idea of path dependence, despite rather different uses (and misuses) in diverse disciplines, is nonetheless commonly linked with the idea that "history matters" in the interpretation of whatever phenomenon one would like to explain. Or, in other words, to understand why a certain entity has become what it is, or why a certain variable has acquired the value that one observes, one needs to bring into the picture, among the explanatory "causes," the past of that entity or the previous time path of that variable. The bottom line ofsuch an intuitive notion is indeed that history matters precisely because another history--even holding the causal linkages of the analyzed system invariant-would have possibly yielded a different outcome.
