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Instrumental variable (IV) methods rely critically on the exclusion restriction, which is untestable in exactly-identified models under standard assumptions. We propose a framework combining IV analysis with the LiNGAM method to test this…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-17 Fernando Delbianco

In observational studies, treatments are typically not randomized and therefore estimated treatment effects may be subject to confounding bias. The instrumental variable (IV) design plays the role of a quasi-experimental handle since the IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-30 Lan Liu , Wang Miao , Baoluo Sun , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Instrumental variables (IV) regression is widely used to estimate causal treatment effects in settings where receipt of treatment is not fully random, but there exists an instrument that generates exogenous variation in treatment exposure.…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-08-10 Stephen Coussens , Jann Spiess

A major challenge in instrumental variables (IV) analysis is to find instruments that are valid, or have no direct effect on the outcome and are ignorable. Typically one is unsure whether all of the putative IVs are in fact valid. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-10 Zijian Guo , Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

We study categorical instrumental variable (IV) models with instrument, treatment, and outcome taking finitely many values. We derive a simple closed-form characterization of the set of joint distributions of potential outcomes that are…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-13 Yilin Song , F. Richard Guo , K. C. Gary Chan , Thomas S. Richardson

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation suffers selection bias when the analysis conditions on the treatment. Judea Pearl's early graphical definition of instrumental variables explicitly prohibited conditioning on the treatment.…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-20 Felix Elwert , Elan Segarra

To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-01 Roy S. Zawadzki , Joshua D. Grill , Daniel L. Gillen

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data. A canonical example is a randomized trial with noncompliance, in which the randomized treatment assignment serves as an IV for the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Rui Wang , Ying-Qi Zhao , Oliver Dukes , Bo Zhang

Proximal causal inference is a recently proposed framework for evaluating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification of causal effects, it leverages a pair of so-called treatment and outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

It is well-known that, without restricting treatment effect heterogeneity, instrumental variable (IV) methods only identify "local" effects among compliers, i.e., those subjects who take treatment only when encouraged by the IV. Local…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-03 Edward H. Kennedy , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Max G'Sell

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

Bounding causal effects analytically, rather than numerically, is appealing for its interpretability and conceptual clarity. Existing sharp methods rely on optimization-based approaches such as the Balke-Pearl framework, whose computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Arefe Boushehrian , Mohammad Reza Badri , Sina Akbari , Negar Kiyavash

In many observational studies, researchers are often interested in studying the effects of multiple exposures on a single outcome. Standard approaches for high-dimensional data such as the lasso assume the associations between the exposures…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-06 Dingke Tang , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-24 Xinyi Zhang , Linbo Wang , Stanislav Volgushev , Dehan Kong

This paper considers inference in a linear instrumental variable regression model with many potentially weak instruments, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. I first show that existing test procedures, including those that…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-04-24 Luther Yap

Instrumental variables regression is a tool that is commonly used in the analysis of observational data. The instrumental variables are used to make causal inference about the effect of a certain exposure in the presence of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-07 Valentin Vancak , Arvid Sjölander

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

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

Unobserved spatial confounding variables are prevalent in environmental and ecological applications where the system under study is complex and the data are often observational. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a common way to address…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-02 Andrew Giffin , Brian J. Reich , Shu Yang , Ana G. Rappold