Lecture

Instrumental Variables: Part 1

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Description

This lecture covers the concept of instrumental variables (IV) in econometrics, focusing on the intuition behind IV and its application in addressing endogeneity issues. The instructor explains how IV helps in isolating the causal effect of a variable on the outcome by using a third variable that is correlated with the endogenous variable but not with the error term. The lecture delves into the instrumental variables estimator, discussing its relevance and exclusion restriction conditions. Through an example from Card (1995) on college proximity and schooling, the lecture illustrates the practical application of IV in empirical analysis, highlighting the importance of testing for weak instruments and the exogeneity of variables. The lecture concludes by introducing extensions of the IV framework and the generalized method of moments (GMM).

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Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Data analysis: Regression analysis

Related concepts (32)

Instrumental variables estimation

In statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and related disciplines, the method of instrumental variables (IV) is used to estimate causal relationships when controlled experiments are not feasible or when a treatment is not successfully delivered to every unit in a randomized experiment. Intuitively, IVs are used when an explanatory variable of interest is correlated with the error term, in which case ordinary least squares and ANOVA give biased results.

Linear regression

In statistics, linear regression is a linear approach for modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables (also known as dependent and independent variables). The case of one explanatory variable is called simple linear regression; for more than one, the process is called multiple linear regression. This term is distinct from multivariate linear regression, where multiple correlated dependent variables are predicted, rather than a single scalar variable.

Ordinary least squares

In statistics, ordinary least squares (OLS) is a type of linear least squares method for choosing the unknown parameters in a linear regression model (with fixed level-one effects of a linear function of a set of explanatory variables) by the principle of least squares: minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observed dependent variable (values of the variable being observed) in the input dataset and the output of the (linear) function of the independent variable.

Endogeneity (econometrics)

In econometrics, endogeneity broadly refers to situations in which an explanatory variable is correlated with the error term. The distinction between endogenous and exogenous variables originated in simultaneous equations models, where one separates variables whose values are determined by the model from variables which are predetermined; ignoring simultaneity in the estimation leads to biased estimates as it violates the exogeneity assumption of the Gauss–Markov theorem.

Econometrics

Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference". An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships". Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics.

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