This article derives an equation characterizing the difference between OLS and IV coefficients under potentially heterogenous treatment effects. This leads to what I call the Coefficient Difference Check, which consists of checking that the difference between the estimated OLS and IV coefficients has the same sign as the expected selection effect. I show failures of this check can arise because: IV is invalid, the expected selection story is incorrect, or there are particular heterogenous treatment effects that imply the IV estimate is both “fragile” and that it provides a more biased estimate of the ATT than OLS. Failures of this check are relatively common in the literature. I describe best practices given such failures.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.