Lecture 24 Instrumental Variables

Nick Huntington-Klein

March 20, 2019

Recap

  • We’ve covered quite a few methods for isolating causal effects!
  • Controlling for variables to close back doors (explain X and Y with the control, remove what’s explained)
  • Matching on variables to close back doors (find treated and non-treated observations with )
  • Using a control group to control for time (before/after difference for treated and untreated, then difference them)
  • Using a cutoff to construct a very good control group (treated/untreated difference near a cutoff)

Today

  • We’ve got ONE LAST METHOD!
  • Today we’ll be covering instrumental variables
  • The basic idea is that we have some variable - the instrumental variable - that causes X but has no other back doors!

Natural Experiments

  • This calls back to our idea of trying to mimic an experiment without having an experiment. In fact, let’s think about an actual randomized experiment.
  • We have some random assignment R that determines your X. So even though we have back doors between X and Y, we can identify X -> Y

Natural Experiments

  • The idea of instrumental variables is this:
  • What if we can find a variable that can take the place of R in the diagram despite not actually being something we randomized in an experiment?
  • If we can do that, we’ve clearly got a “natural experiment”
  • When we find a variable that can do that, we call it an “instrument” or “instrumental variable”
  • Let’s call it Z

Instrumental Variable

So, for Z take the place of R in the diagram, what do we need?

  • Z must be related to X (typically Z -> X but not always)
  • There must be no open paths from Z to Y except for ones that go through X

In other words “Z is related to X, and all the effect of Z on Y goes THROUGH X

Instrumental Variable

How?

  • Explain X with Z, and keep only what is explained, X'
  • Explain Y with Z, and keep only what is explained, Y'
  • [If Z is logical/binary] Divide the difference in Y' between Z values by the difference in X' between Z values
  • [If Z is not logical/binary] Get the correlation between X' and Y'

Graphically