Building a Stronger Instrument in an Observational Study of Perinatal Care for Premature Infants
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In this article, an instrument is defined as a random nudge toward acceptance of a treatment that affects outcomes only to the extent that it affects acceptance of the treatment, i.e., it is used to extract bits of random treatment assignment from a setting that is quite biased in its treatment assignments.Abstract:
An instrument is a random nudge toward acceptance of a treatment that affects outcomes only to the extent that it affects acceptance of the treatment. Nonetheless, in settings in which treatment assignment is mostly deliberate and not random, there may exist some essentially random nudges to accept treatment, so that use of an instrument might extract bits of random treatment assignment from a setting that is otherwise quite biased in its treatment assignments. An instrument is weak if the random nudges barely influence treatment assignment or strong if the nudges are often decisive in influencing treatment assignment. Although ideally an ostensibly random instrument is perfectly random and not biased, it is not possible to be certain of this; thus a typical concern is that even the instrument might be biased to some degree. It is known from theoretical arguments that weak instruments are invariably sensitive to extremely small biases; for this reason, strong instruments are preferred. The strength of an ...read more
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References
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Identification of Causal effects Using Instrumental Variables
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Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables
TL;DR: It is shown that the instrumental variables (IV) estimand can be embedded within the Rubin Causal Model (RCM) and that under some simple and easily interpretable assumptions, the IV estimand is the average causal effect for a subgroup of units, the compliers.
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Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings
TL;DR: This paper found that the season of birth is related to educational attainment and earnings, and that roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws. But, they did not study the effect of compulsory attendance laws on educational attainment.