Part 2 – The claim and its estimand
Part 2 is the conceptual centre of the day. It reads the paper in full, argues that analysts who look as though they disagree are often answering different questions, and gives you the vocabulary for saying which question you are answering. The causal-graph crash course follows in full, and then your own estimand and graph.
| Work through | What you do | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Slides, the paper in full | The four framing scales, the model that the original author (OA) fitted, Model 1 and Model 2, which put the robustness question inside the paper, the failed attempts to reproduce the paper and the replication on new data whose estimate had the opposite sign, and the five questions that the Multi100 analysts asked in the free phase, when each chose their own analysis. | 15 minutes |
| Slides, the estimands run | The red-card estimates again as a single row, four estimands drawn out of one football question, and the spread that collapses once the estimand is fixed. Lundberg’s three steps from a theoretical quantity to an empirical one. | 21 minutes |
| Slides, the causal-graph crash course, with Causal graphs as the companion | Confounders, mediators and colliders, each fitted as well as drawn; causal stories behind a correlation; open and closed paths; total against direct effects; selection and feedback. Then our own claim, why a graph is worth drawing when identification is out of reach, and the half-built graph. Everyone writes a one-sentence estimand, holds it, and sends it together. | 36 minutes |
R/dag_starter.R in the workspace, or Browser lab Task 2 |
Look at the panel; write the estimand in words; take the # off the arrows you are willing to defend, re-run adjustmentSets(), and write two sentences on what two-way fixed effects adjust for and what they cannot fix. |
18 minutes |
By the end of the part you have the estimand behind the claim written in one sentence, a graph that includes only the arrows you are willing to defend, and the adjustment set that follows from it.