A Selection Bias Approach to Sensitivity Analysis for Causal Effects* Matthew Blackwell† April 17, 2013 Abstract e estimation of causal effects has a revered place in all elds of empirical political sci- ence, but a large volume of methodological and applied work ignores a fundamental fact: most people are skeptical of estimated causal effects. In particular, researchers are oen worried about the assumption of no omitted variables or no unmeasured confounders. is paper combines two approaches to sensitivity analysis to provide researchers with a tool to investigate how specic violations of no omitted variables alter their estimates. is approach can help researchers determine which narratives imply weaker results and which actually strengthen their claims. is gives researchers and critics a reasoned and quantitative approach to assessing the plausibility of causal effects. To demonstrate the ap- proach, I present applications to three causal inference estimation strategies: regression, matching, and weighting. *e methods used in this article are available as an open-source R package, causalsens, on the Com- prehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and the author’s website. e replication archive for this article is available at the Political Analysis Dataverse as Blackwell (b). Many thanks to Steve Ansolabehere, Adam Glynn, Gary King, Jamie Robins, Maya Sen, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussions. All remaining errors are my own. †Department of Political Science, University of Rochester. web: http://www.mattblackwell.org email:
[email protected] Introduction Scientic progress marches to the drumbeat of criticism and skepticism. While the so- cial sciences marshal empirical evidence for interpretations and hypotheses about the world, an academic’s rst (healthy!) instinct is usually to counterattack with an alter- native account.