Prof. Guido Imbens (Professor of Applied Econometrics at Stanford, and Nobel Prize Winner in Economics 2021) lead the research seminar on Monday 6 November based at the Erasmus Institute of Philosophy and Economics at the Erasmus School of Philosophy.
Participants discussed his 2020 Journal of Economic Literature paper "Potential Outcome and Directed Acyclic Graph Approaches to Causality: Relevance for Empirical Practice in Economics", in which he contrasts Judea Pearls' graphical framework for analyzing causation with the Potential Outcomes framework.
Comments were given by Lennart Ackermans (ESPhil) and Christopher Clarke (ESPhil). Many staff and students from ESE and the Tinbergen Institute were present. The discussion covered a wide range of topics: M-bias, unconfoundedness, applications to time-series contexts, application in macro versus micro, and the extent to which econometricians should measure causal effects that are not directly associated with a policy intervention.