Poorly Measured Confounders are More Useful on the Left than on the Right

Abstract

Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression-based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right-hand side of the regression. If such additions do not affect the coefficient of interest (much), a study is presumed to be reliable. We caution that such invariance may result from the fact that the observed variables used in such robustness checks are often poor measures of the potential underlying confounders. In this ca Show more