causal inference

Recently, there has been a lot of interest and discussion about the use of causal inference in economics. Whether it is feasible and whether there are benefits of working with a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and a non-parametric structural equation framework, is one aspect of the debate.

The causal effect of an intervention (treatment/exposure) on an outcome can be estimated by: i) specifying knowledge about the data-generating process; ii) assessing under what assumptions a target quantity, such as for example a causal odds ratio, can be identified given the specified knowledge (and given the measured data); and then, iii) using appropriate statistical estimation techniques to estimate the desired parameter of interest.