Instrumental Variables Estimation of Average Treatment Effects in Econometrics and Epidemiology / Joshua D. Angrist.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Angrist, Joshua D.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Technical Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. t0115.

NBER technical working paper series no. t0115

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Econometrics.

Instrumental variables (Statistics).

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1991.

Cambridge, Massachusetts : National Bureau of Economic Research, 1991.

Summary:

The average effect of intervention or treatment is a parameter of interest in both epidemiology and econometrics. A key difference between applications in the two fields is that epidemiologic research is more likely to involve qualitative outcomes and nonlinear models. An example is the recent use of the Vietnam era draft lottery to construct estimates of the effect of Vietnam era military service on civilian mortality. In this paper. I present necessary and sufficient conditions for linear instrumental variables. techniques to consistently estimate average treatment effects in qualitative or other nonlinear models. Most latent index models commonly applied to qualitative outcomes in econometrics fail to satisfy these conditions, and monte carlo evidence on the bias of instrumental estimates of the average treatment effect in a bivariate probit model is presented. The evidence suggests that linear instrumental variables estimators perform nearly as well as the correctly specified maximum likelihood estimator. especially in large samples. Linear instrumental variables and the normal maximum likelihood estimator are also remarkably robust to non-normality.

Notes:

Print version record

November 1991.