Tag Archives: Statistics & Econometrics

Instrumental variables — in search for identification We need relevance and validity. How realistic is validity, anyway? We ideally want our instrument to behave just like randomization in an experiment. But in the real world, how likely is that to actually happen? Or, if it’s an IV that requires control variables to be valid, how confident can we be that the controls really do everything we need them to? In the long-ago times, researchers were happy to...

Causal discovery and the faithfulness assumption (student stuff) .[embedded content] For more on the (questionable) faithfulness assumption, cf. chapter six of Nancy Cartwright’s Hunting causes and using them.

Conditional probabilities (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Which causal inference books to read Source All suggestions are highly readable, but for the general reader, yours truly would also like to recommend The book of why by Pearl & Mackenzie.

RCT — a questionable claim of establishing causality The ideal RCT is the special case in which the trial’s treatment status is also assigned randomly (in addition to drawing random samples from the two populations, one treated and one not) and the only error is due to sampling variability … In this special case, as the number of trials increases, the mean of the trial estimates tends to get closer to the true mean impact. This is the sense in which an...

The role of RCTs in development .[embedded content]

Econometrics — science based on unwarranted assumptions There is first of all the central question of methodology — the logic of applying the method of multiple correlation to unanalysed economic material, which we know to be non-homogeneous through time. If we are dealing with the action of numerically measurable, independent forces, adequately analysed so that we were dealing with independent atomic factors and between them completely comprehensive,...

Causal inference in social sciences (student stuff) .[embedded content]

The main ideas behind bootstrapping (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Propensity score matching vs. regression (student stuff) .[embedded content]