Felix Elwert - University of Wisconsin
Endogenous Selection Bias
Date: 03/01/2012 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Breedlove Room, 204 Perkins Library
Organizer: Ken Land, Giovanna Merli
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
- ** All meetings below are in room 213-H Social-Sciences **
9:30am - Elizabeth Frankenberg
10:00am - Katherine King
10:30am - Jim Moody
11:00am - Steve Vaisey
11:30am - OPEN
12:00pm - Lunch (Matt Bradshaw)
1:00pm - Meetings with DuPRI students (Jake Fisher, Qiang Fu, Hang Young Lee)
2:00pm - OPEN
2:30pm - Giovanna Merli
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
- Wed, Feb 29
6:00pm - dinner (Elwert, Merli, Land, Hamoudi) STARTS AT 6.45pm
Additional Comments: Abstract: Selection bias is a central problem for causal inference in the social sciences. Quite how central a problem it is, however, is often obscured by ambiguous terminology, needlessly technical presentations, and narrow rules of thumb. This paper uses directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to advance a precise yet intuitive global definition of endogenous selection bias and argue its theoretical and practical centrality for causal inference. The paper clarifies the fundamental structural difference between confounding and endogenous selection, shows that nearly all non-parametric identification problems relate to either confounding or endogenous selection, and argues that the problem of endogenous selection is indifferent to timing. Perhaps most importantly, we illustrate the importance of endogenous selection bias with numerous and varied examples from empirical research in sociology.