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A General Approach to Relaxing Unconfoundedness

Matthew A. Masten, Alexandre Poirier, Muyang Ren

arXiv 26 Jan 2025 · Econometrics

arXiv:2501.15400 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper defines a general class of relaxations of the unconfoundedness assumption. This class includes several previous approaches as special cases, including the marginal sensitivity model of Tan (2006). This class therefore allows us to precisely compare and contrast these previously disparate relaxations. We use this class to derive a variety of new identification results which can be used to assess sensitivity to unconfoundedness. In particular, the prior literature focuses on average parameters, like the average treatment effect (ATE). We move beyond averages by providing sharp bounds for a large class of parameters, including both the quantile treatment effect (QTE) and the distribution of treatment effects (DTE), results which were previously unknown even for the marginal sensitivity model.

Citation extraction

40
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Tan, Z (2006) A distributional approach for causal inference using propensity scores1.00073100%
2Masten, M. A. and A. Poirier (2018) a): Identification of treatment effects under conditional partial independence self1.00053100%
3Dorn, J., K. Guo, and N. Kallus (2024) Doubly-valid/doubly-sharp sensitivity analysis for causal inference with unmeasured confounding0.92844100%
4Fan, Y. and S. S. Park (2010) Sharp bounds on the distribution of treatment effects and their statistical inference0.8746367%
5Dorn, J. and K. Guo (2023) Sharp sensitivity analysis for inverse propensity weighting via quantile balancing0.84333100%
6Rambachan, A., A. Coston, and E. Kennedy (2023) Robust design and evaluation of predictive algorithms under unobserved confounding0.73732100%
7Kallus, N. and A. Zhou (2018) Confounding-robust policy improvement, in0.64422100%
8Masten, M. A. and A. Poirier (2020) Inference on breakdown frontiers self0.64422100%
9Zhao, Q., D. S. Small, and B. B. Bhattacharya (2019) Sensitivity analysis for inverse probability weighting estimators via the percentile bootstrap0.51121100%
10Bonvini, M. and E. H. Kennedy (2022) Sensitivity analysis via the proportion of unmeasured confounding0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 40 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Policy Learning under Unobserved Confounding: A Robust and Efficient Approach0.40511
2TITLE0.40511