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Instrumental variable regression is a common approach for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, identifying valid instruments is often difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-22 Gregor Steiner , Jeremie Houssineau , Mark F. J. Steel

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

Inferring causal relationships from observational data is often challenging due to endogeneity. This paper provides new identification results for causal effects of discrete, ordered and continuous treatments using multiple binary…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-10-21 Nadja van 't Hoff

Instrumental variable (IV) analyses are becoming common in health services research and epidemiology. Most IV analyses use naturally occurring instruments, such as distance to a hospital. In these analyses, investigators must assume the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-04 Zach Branson , Luke Keele

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

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 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 (IV) provides a source of treatment randomization that is conditionally independent of the outcomes, responding to the challenges of counterfactual and confounding biases. In finance, IV construction typically relies…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-27 Ying Chen , Ziwei Xu , Kotaro Inoue , Ryutaro Ichise

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

Can instrumental variables be found from data? While instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to identify causal effect, testing their validity from observed data remains a challenge. This is because validity of an IV depends on…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-05 Amit Sharma

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are becoming increasingly popular as they seem to offer the only viable way to overcome the problem of unobserved confounding in observational studies. However, some attention has to be paid to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-03 Vanessa Didelez , Sha Meng , Nuala A. Sheehan

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

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

In this note, we offer an approach to estimating causal/structural parameters in the presence of many instruments and controls based on methods for estimating sparse high-dimensional models. We use these high-dimensional methods to select…

Applications · Statistics 2017-10-03 Victor Chernozhukov , Christian Hansen , Martin Spindler

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Instrumental variable methods have been widely used to identify causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. A key identification condition known as the exclusion restriction states that the instrument cannot have a direct…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-05 Baoluo Sun , Yifan Cui , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele , James Robins

Instrumental variable (IV) methods allow us the opportunity to address unmeasured confounding in causal inference. However, most IV methods are only applicable to discrete or continuous outcomes with very few IV methods for censored…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-30 Youjin Lee , Edward H. Kennedy , Nandita Mitra

When a researcher combines multiple instrumental variables for a single binary treatment, the monotonicity assumption of the local average treatment effects (LATE) framework can become restrictive: it requires that all units share a common…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-03-27 Leonard Goff

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu