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Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding between exposure and outcome. An IV must affect the outcome exclusively through the exposure and be unconfounded with the…

Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-10 Ricardo Silva , Shohei Shimizu

Instrumental variable analysis is a widely used method to estimate causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. When the instruments, exposure and outcome are not measured in the same sample, Angrist and Krueger (1992)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-07 Qingyuan Zhao , Jingshu Wang , Jack Bowden , Dylan S. Small

When an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors, an instrumental variable (IV) can be used to identify and estimate certain causal contrasts. Identification of the marginal average treatment effect (ATE) from IVs relies on…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-02 Alexander W. Levis , Matteo Bonvini , Zhenghao Zeng , Luke Keele , Edward H. Kennedy

Nonlinear causal effects are prevalent in many research scenarios involving continuous exposures, and instrumental variables (IVs) can be employed to investigate such effects, particularly in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-29 Haodong Tian , Ashish Patel , Stephen Burgess

There is an increasing interest in estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in randomized and observational studies. However, little research has been conducted to understand heterogeneity in an instrumental variables study. In this work,…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-20 Michael Johnson , Jiongyi Cao , Hyunseung Kang

In observational studies, instrumental variables estimation is greatly utilized to identify causal effects. One of the key conditions for the instrumental variables estimator to be consistent is the exclusion restriction, which indicates…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-16 Gyuhyeong Goh , Jisang Yu

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

Instrument variable (IV) methods are widely used in empirical research to identify causal effects of a policy. In the local average treatment effect (LATE) framework, the IV estimand identifies the LATE under three main assumptions: random…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-03-21 Désiré Kédagni , Huan Wu , Yi Cui

Many proposals for the identification of causal effects require an instrumental variable that satisfies strong, untestable unconfoundedness and exclusion restriction assumptions. In this paper, we show how one can potentially identify…

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Thuc duy Le , Jixue Liu

Instrumental variables are a popular study design for the estimation of treatment effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. In the canonical instrumental variables design, the instrument is a binary variable. In many settings,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-10 Prabrisha Rakshit , Alexander Levis , Luke Keele

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

Instrumental variable methods are widely used for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Existing instrumental variable methods for nonlinear outcome models require stringent identifiability conditions. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-01 Sai Li , Zijian Guo

Instrumental variables have been widely used for estimating the causal effect between exposure and outcome. Conventional estimation methods require complete knowledge about all the instruments' validity; a valid instrument must not have a…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-09-23 Hyunseung Kang , Anru Zhang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variables allow for quantification of cause and effect relationships even in the absence of interventions. To achieve this, a number of causal assumptions must be met, the most important of which is the independence assumption,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-05 Nikolai Miklin , Mariami Gachechiladze , George Moreno , Rafael Chaves

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Danielle Tsao , Krikamol Muandet , Frederick Eberhardt , Emilija Perković

The conditional average treatment effect (CATE) is frequently estimated to refute the homogeneous treatment effect assumption. Under this assumption, all units making up the population under study experience identical benefit from a given…

The hypothesis of homogeneous treatment effects is central to the instrumental variables literature. This assumption signifies that treatment effects are constant across all subjects. It allows to interpret instrumental variable estimates…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-04-17 Jad Beyhum , Jean-Pierre Florens , Elia Lapenta , Ingrid Van Keilegom

This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument:…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-23 Christophe Bruneel-Zupanc