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Bounds on direct and indirect effects under treatment/mediator endogeneity and outcome attrition

BP2-STS

    01.05.2020

33

Causal mechanisms
direct effects
indirect effects
causal channels
mediation analysis
sample selection
bounds
English Causal mediation analysis aims at disentangling a treatment effect into an indirect mechanism operating through an intermediate outcome or mediator, as well as the direct effect of the treatment on the outcome of interest. However, the evaluation of direct and indirect effects is frequently complicated by non-ignorable selection into the treatment and/or mediator, even after controlling for observables, as well as sample selection/outcome attrition. We propose a method for bounding direct and indirect effects in the presence of such complications using a method that is based on a sequence of linear programming problems. Considering inverse probability weighting by propensity scores, we compute the weights that would yield identification in the absence of complications and perturb them by an entropy parameter reflecting a specific amount of propensity score misspecification to set-identify the effects of interest. We apply our method to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to derive bounds on the explained and unexplained components of a gender wage gap decomposition that is likely prone to non-ignorable mediator selection and outcome attrition.
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Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Other electronic version

Faculté SES

Series statement
  • Working Papers SES ; 514
License
License undefined
Identifiers
  • RERO DOC 328390
  • RERO R009039825
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/308602
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