Tag Archives: instrumental variables

On Fridays, we examine a research paper that uses (or fails to use) a clever method to perform causal inference, i.e. to tease out cause and effect. Economists Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu have a new paper published in the American Economic Review (also available in working paper form here) that shows that the existence of Fox News has a (statistically) significant impact on Republican vote share. Here’s the abstract:We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for...

Steve Levitt, in addition to gaining fame (at least at an economist level, not a Justin Bieber level) for writing Freakonomics, has made a career teasing cause and effect out of (largely) observational data. (By “observational data,” I mean that he doesn’t explicitly run controlled experiments in a lot of cases and just looks at the world as it transpired naturally instead.) Observational data presents an interesting challenge because people usually make choices in life rather than being...