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Scholars frequently use covariate balance tests to test the validity of natural experiments and related designs. Unfortunately, when measured covariates are unrelated to potential outcomes, balance is uninformative about key identification…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-15 Clara Bicalho , Adam Bouyamourn , Thad Dunning

Background: It has long been advised to account for baseline covariates in the analysis of confirmatory randomised trials, with the main statistical justifications being that this increases power and, when a randomisation scheme balanced…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Tim P. Morris , A. Sarah Walker , Elizabeth J. Williamson , Ian R. White

The technique of data augmentation (DA) is often used in machine learning for regularization purposes to better generalize under i.i.d. settings. In this work, we present a unifying framework with topics in causal inference to make a case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Uzair Akbar , Niki Kilbertus , Hao Shen , Krikamol Muandet , Bo Dai

Instrumental variables are commonly used to estimate effects of a treatment afflicted by unmeasured confounding, and in practice instruments are often continuous (e.g., measures of distance, or treatment preference). However, available…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-05 Edward H. Kennedy , Scott A. Lorch , Dylan S. Small

Unmeasured confounding is a key threat to reliable causal inference based on observational studies. Motivated from two powerful natural experiment devices, the instrumental variables and difference-in-differences, we propose a new method…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-09 Ting Ye , Ashkan Ertefaie , James Flory , Sean Hennessy , Dylan S. Small

Finding valid instruments is difficult. We propose Validity Set Instrumental Variable (VSIV) estimation, a method for estimating local average treatment effects (LATEs) in heterogeneous causal effect models when the instruments are…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-11 Zhenting Sun , Kaspar Wüthrich

Missing data occur frequently in empirical studies in health and social sciences, often compromising our ability to make accurate inferences. An outcome is said to be missing not at random (MNAR) if, conditional on the observed variables,…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-23 BaoLuo Sun , Lan Liu , Wang Miao , Kathleen Wirth , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

In randomized trials, researchers are often interested in mediation analysis to understand how a treatment works, in particular how much of a treatment's effect is mediated by an intermediated variable and how much the treatment directly…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-01 Dylan S. Small

Traditional instrumental variable (IV) methods often struggle with weak or invalid instruments and rely heavily on external data. We introduce a Synthetic Instrumental Variable (SIV) approach that constructs valid instruments using only…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-22 Ratbek Dzhumashev , Ainura Tursunalieva

Many treatment variables used in empirical applications nest multiple unobserved versions of a treatment. I show that instrumental variable (IV) estimands for the effect of a composite treatment are IV-specific weighted averages of effects…

General Economics · Economics 2022-11-24 Clint Harris

Many policy evaluations using instrumental variable (IV) methods include individuals who interact with each other, potentially violating the standard IV assumptions. This paper defines and partially identifies direct and spillover effects…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-17 Didier Nibbering , Matthijs Oosterveen

Recently, there has been a surge in methodological development for the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to evaluate causal effects. Standard methods in the literature rely on the parallel trends assumption to identify the average…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Pan Zhao , Yifan Cui

Randomization inference is a widely-used and appealing approach for analyzing treatment effects in randomized experiments, as it is finite-sample valid and does not require any distributional assumptions. However, naive application of…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Xinran Li , Peizan Sheng , Zeyang Yu

We propose and implement an approach to inference in linear instrumental variables models which is simultaneously robust and computationally tractable. Inference is based on self-normalization of sample moment conditions, and allows for…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-11-29 Eric Gautier , Christiern Rose

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

The survey experiment is widely used in economics and social sciences to evaluate the effects of treatments or programs. In a standard population-based survey experiment, the experimenter randomly draws experimental units from a target…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-11 Pengfei Tian , Jiyang Ren , Yingying Ma

This paper considers two-sided tests for the parameter of an endogenous variable in an instrumental variable (IV) model with heteroskedastic and autocorrelated errors. We develop the finite-sample theory of weighted-average power (WAP)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-05-26 Humberto Moreira , Marcelo J. Moreira

Gene expression and phenotype association can be affected by potential unmeasured confounders from multiple sources, leading to biased estimates of the associations. Since genetic variants largely explain gene expression variations, they…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-23 Jiarui Lu , Hongzhe Li

It is common to conduct causal inference in matched observational studies by proceeding as though treatment assignments within matched sets are assigned uniformly at random and using this distribution as the basis for inference. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-14 Samuel D. Pimentel , Yaxuan Huang

We introduce a new randomization procedure for experiments based on the cube method, which achieves near-exact covariate balance. This ensures compliance with standard balance tests and allows for balancing on many covariates, enabling more…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-21 Laurent Davezies , Guillaume Hollard , Pedro Vergara Merino