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Brittany and Michael present 5 Pioneers in Instrumental Variables

Josh Angrist!
scott cunningham
Dec 22, 2022
∙ Paid
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Instrumental variables, as you may have picked up by now, has many fathers, and it goes back a long long time. As you saw in the first entry by Brittany and Michael, it appears to have been “discovered” first by Philip and Sewell Wright, a father-son team who collaborated to bend Sewell’s path analysis to the purpose of building up a statistical model that could estimate the elasticity of demand even without a randomized experiment.1

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Brittany and Michael Introduce: Five Pioneers in Instrumental Variables
Watch now (2 min) | Brittany and Michael are back with another series, this time entitled “Five Pioneers in Instrumental Variables”. What’s instrumental variables? Well according to them, it’s when one irrelevant thing does something to some second thing a second thing so we know how the second thing changes the third thing.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Arguably, instrumental variables is one of the most important tools in the causal inference toolbox, and while it has its detractors, it was given some love not too long ago by a…
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a year ago · 2 likes · scott cunningham

Tinbergen, one of the pioneers in econometrics, builds up the instrumental variables family of estimators too.

Scott's Substack
Brittany and Michael present Five Pioneers in Instrumental Variables
Watch now (2 min) | Some of you may know this by now, but I have a fairly intense obsession with everything to do with causal inference for a guy who probably will never be much more than an observer from afar. I find the concepts and the methods and the stories all in all very interesting. Which is why I have been waiting on pins and needles for Brittany and Michael’s newest series, “Five Pioneers in Instrumental Variables”. Instrumental variables, or IV for short, is one of the most important tools in the causal inference toolkit. It has many fathers ranging from the Wrights, to Abraham Wald, to today’s entry, Dr. Jan Tinbergen…
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a year ago · 5 likes · scott cunningham

Abraham Wald gets a mention given the ubiquity of the Wald estimator.

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Brittney and Michael Present "5 Pioneers in IV"
Watch now (2 min) | Brittney and Michael are back with five people they want to tell you about for their involvement in helping instrumental variables become what it is today. The first day we got Philip and Sewell Wright, a father and son team who using some weird math together figured out instrumental variables, maybe for the very first time. But today we get none other than Wald estimator man himself, Abraham Wald! This is better than the 12 days of Christmas! Tune in to see who’s next…
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a year ago · 4 likes · scott cunningham

So who is next? Brittany and Michael continue their march to Christmas with their latest entry in “Five Pioneers in Instrumental Variables” with none other than Josh Angist himself. For those who don’t know, Josh was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2021 (alongside his former professor David Card and co-author Guido Imbens). And the Nobel committee named his …

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Hatful of Hollow
Weekly roundup of stuff in my head I found online or have been thinking about including discussions about psychedelic science and reform, mental illness, econometrics, economics as a profession, and TikTok accounts.
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