Causal Inference – Healthcare Economist

Which econometric method should you use for causal inference of health policy?

2024-10-242024-10-24Jason Shafrin

TL;DR A paper by Ress and Wild (2024) provide the following recommendations in answering this question. When aiming to control for a large covariate set, consider using the superlearner to estimate nuisance parameters. When employing the superlearner to estimate nuisance parameters, consider using doubly robust estimation approaches, such as AIPW and TMLE. When faced with…

What is collider bias?

2022-03-30Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

A paper by Holmberg et al. (2022) in JAMA provides a number of examples of how collider bias can lead to problematic causal inference. The term collider bias is often invoked when using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to map the causal pathway. Collider bias occurs when you aim to measure the impact of A on…

Critical Causal Inference Assumptions

2020-04-232020-04-23Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

You have data. You see that when people receive an intervention, the outcomes differ. Is this effect causal? For this to be the case you need 4 critical assumptions. Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). This assumes that each treated unit does not affect other units. For instance, consider the case where you imposed a…