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Placebo Tests for Casual Inference
Delivered via Zoom
Estimates of treatment effects using observational data can be biased due to confounding, model misspecification, and other reasons. A placebo test offers a complementary diagnostic for evaluating these threats to inference by checking for a relationship that should be found in the data if the main estimates were biased, but should be absent otherwise. Drawing on a comprehensive survey of recent empirical work in political science, this paper defines placebo tests, introduces a typology of tests, and analyzes what makes them informative (both in ideal and non-ideal circumstances). We discuss examples of placebo tests that effectively address different types of bias; we also point out tests and types of tests that we argue are largely uninformative, and we highlight the problem of null hacking in the design of placebo tests.
Date:
8 May 2020, 12:15
Venue:
Zoom
Speaker:
Andy Eggers (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)
Organisers:
Dr Radoslaw Zubek (University of Oxford),
Professor Petra Schleiter (University of Oxford),
Dr David Doyle (University of Oxford),
Nelson Ruiz (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Politics Research Colloquium
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Hannah Vinten
