12.6 Examples & Further reading

  • Does lower turnout reduce the vote share of the democratic party? (Hansford and Gomez 2010)
    • Instrument: Rainfall decreases turnout on election day
    • Treatment: Turnout
    • Outcome: Democratic vote share
    • LATE: Effect of turnout on vote share among the counties discouraged to vote by rain on election day
  • The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011a)
    • Outcome: Trust
    • Treatment: Slave trade (numbers between 1400 and 1900)
    • Instrument: Distance to the coast
  • The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001)
    • Outcome: Economic performance
    • Treatment: Institutions
    • Instrument: European settler mortality rates (between 17th-19th century)
  • Lifetime Earnings and the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery: Evidence from Social Security Administrative Records (Angrist 1990)
    • Outcome: Civilian earnings
    • Treatment: Veteran status
    • Instrument: Draft lottery
  • Sovey and Green (2011) for an overview in political science
  • Bound, Jaeger, and Baker (1995) for failures
  • Dunning (2009) for a general overview
  • Angrist, Imbens, and Rubin (1996) for logic
  • Deaton (2010) for a critique and answer by Imbens (2010)

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” The American Economic Review 91 (5): 1369–1401.

Angrist, Joshua D. 1990. “Lifetime Earnings and the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery: Evidence from Social Security Administrative Records.” Am. Econ. Rev. 80 (3): 313–36.

Angrist, Joshua D, Guido W Imbens, and Donald B Rubin. 1996. “Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables.” J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 91 (434): 444–55.

Bound, John, David A Jaeger, and Regina M Baker. 1995. “Problems with Instrumental Variables Estimation When the Correlation Between the Instruments and the Endogenous Explanatory Variable Is Weak.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 90 (430): 443–50.

Deaton, Angus. 2010. “Instruments, Randomization, and Learning About Development.” Journal of Economic Literature 48 (2): 424–55.

Dunning, Thad. 2009. “Instrumental Variables.” In International Encyclopedia of Political Science.

Hansford, Thomas G, and Brad T Gomez. 2010. “Estimating the Electoral Effects of Voter Turnout.” The American Political Science Review 104 (02): 268–88.

Imbens, Guido W. 2010. “Better LATE Than Nothing: Some Comments on Deaton (2009) and Heckman and Urzua (2009).” J. Econ. Lit. 48 (2): 399–423.

Nunn, Nathan, and Leonard Wantchekon. 2011a. “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa.” Am. Econ. Rev. 101 (7): 3221–52.

Sovey, Allison J, and Donald P Green. 2011. “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science: A Readers’ Guide.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (1): 188–200.