Lars P. Syll

Challenging causal models — the low birth weight paradox .[embedded content] Lesson learned? Beware of collider bias and ‘censored’ data!

Impfgegner — Leute mit amputiertes Gehirn .[embedded content]

Yours truly on The Top Economics Blogs list Mainstream economics has sadly made economics increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Trying to contribute in making economics a more realist and relevant science, yours truly launched this blog in March 2011. Now, ten years later and with millions of page views on it, yours truly is — together with people like e.g. Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman — ranked on INOMICS’ The Top Economics Blogs...

Collider bias (student stuff) .[embedded content]

How statistics can be misleading .[embedded content] From a theoretical perspective, Simpson’s paradox importantly shows that causality can never be reduced to a question of statistics or probabilities. To understand causality we always have to relate it to a specific causal structure. Statistical correlations are never enough. No structure, no causality. Simpson’s paradox is an interesting paradox in itself, but it can also highlight a deficiency in the...

Causal inference from observational data Researchers often determine the individual’s contemporary IQ or IQ earlier in life, socioeconomic status of the family of origin, living circumstances when the individual was a child, number of siblings, whether the family had a library card, educational attainment of the individual, and other variables, and put all of them into a multiple-regression equation predicting adult socioeconomic status or income or social...

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Contaminated data — the case of racial discrimination .[embedded content]

Is causality only in the mind? I make two main points that are firmly anchored in the econometric tradition. The first is that causality is a property of a model of hypotheticals. A fully articulated model of the phenomena being studied precisely defines hypothetical or counterfactual states. A definition of causality drops out of a fully articulated model as an automatic by-product. A model is a set of possible counterfactual worlds constructed under some...

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