Spatial interdependence and instrumental variable models
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| Authors | Timm Betz, Scott J. Cook, Florian Max Benjamin Hollenbach |
| Journal/Conference Name | POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH AND METHODS |
| Paper Category | Social Sciences |
| Paper Abstract | Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to address endogeneity concerns in research using observational data. Yet, a specific kind of endogeneity – spatial interdependence – is regularly ignored in this research, threatening claims of causal identification. We show that ignoring spatial interdependence results in asymptotically biased estimates, even when instruments are randomly assigned. The extent of this bias increases when the instrument is also spatially distributed, which is the case for most widely-used instruments (such as rainfall, natural disasters, economic shocks, regionallyor globally-weighted averages, etc.). We demonstrate the extent of these biases both analytically and via Monte Carlo simulation. Finally, we discuss a simple estimation strategy that can be employed to recover consistent estimates of the desired effects. |
| Date of publication | 2019 |
| Code Programming Language | R |
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