Related papers: Weak Instrumental Variables: Limitations of Tradit…
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,…
Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess…
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…
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)…
We study instrumental-variable designs where policy reforms strongly shift the distribution of an endogenous variable but only weakly move its mean. We formalize this by introducing distributional relevance: instruments may be purely…
In a causal graphical model, an instrument for a variable X and its effect Y is a random variable that is a cause of X and independent of all the causes of Y except X. (Pearl (1995), Spirtes et al (2000)). Instrumental variables can be used…
We consider estimation and inference in a linear model with endogenous regressors where the parameters of interest change across two samples. If the first-stage is common, we show how to use this information to obtain more efficient…
Panel data methods are widely used in empirical analysis to address unobserved heterogeneity, but causal inference remains challenging when treatments are endogenous and confounding variables high-dimensional and potentially nonlinear.…
Model-Implied Instrumental Variable Two-Stage Least Squares (MIIV-2SLS) is a limited information, equation-by-equation, non-iterative estimator for latent variable models. Associated with this estimator are equation specific tests of model…
The two-stage least-squares (2SLS) estimator is known to be biased when its first-stage fit is poor. I show that better first-stage prediction can alleviate this bias. In a two-stage linear regression model with Normal noise, I consider…
Two-stage least squares (TSLS) estimators and variants thereof are widely used to infer the effect of an exposure on an outcome using instrumental variables (IVs). They belong to a wider class of two-stage IV estimators, which are based on…
This paper develops a new specification test for the instrument weakness when the number of instruments $K_n$ is large with a magnitude comparable to the sample size $n$. The test relies on the fact that the difference between the two-stage…
Instrumental variable (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects in settings with unobserved confounding, where we cannot directly experiment on the treatment variable. Instruments are variables which only affect the outcome…
Linear instrumental variable regressions are widely used to estimate causal effects. Many instruments arise from the use of ``technical'' instruments and more recently from the empirical strategy of ``judge design''. This paper surveys and…
The instrumental variable method is widely used in the health and social sciences for identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of potentially unmeasured confounding. In order to improve efficiency, multiple…
In a linear instrumental variables (IV) setting for estimating the causal effects of multiple confounded exposure/treatment variables on an outcome, we investigate the adaptive Lasso method for selecting valid instrumental variables from a…
We derive mean-unbiased estimators for the structural parameter in instrumental variables models with a single endogenous regressor where the sign of one or more first stage coefficients is known. In the case with a single instrument, there…
We provide an overview of results relating to estimation and weak-instrument-robust inference in instrumental variables regression. Methods are implemented in the ivmodels software package for Python, which we use to illustrate results.
Instrumental variable methods are often used for parameter estimation in the presence of confounding. They can also be applied in stochastic processes. Instrumental variable analysis exploits moment equations to obtain estimators for causal…
To estimate the causal effects of beliefs on actions, researchers often run information provision experiments. We consider the causal interpretation of two-stage least squares (TSLS) estimators in these experiments. We characterize common…