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Causality

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Living Standards Analytics

Part of the book series: Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences ((SSBS))

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Abstract

Well over 200 years ago, Adam Smith wrote his classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Of course interest in causality goes back much further: Democritus, the pre-Socratic “laughing philosopher,” wrote, “I would rather discover one causal law than be King of Persia.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    LATE stands for local average treatment effect; we discuss this further in Chap. 12.

  2. 2.

    Tetrad allows one to use either continuous data, or categorical data, but not a mixture of both, unless the user provides a priori information on which pairs of variables are independent conditionally on other variables. When categorical data are used, Tetrad tests for independence using contingency tables. For further details see Haughton et al. (2006).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley College, Waltham, MA, USA

    Dominique Haughton

  2. Department of Economics, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA

    Jonathan Haughton

Authors
  1. Dominique Haughton
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  2. Jonathan Haughton
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Correspondence to Dominique Haughton .

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Haughton, D., Haughton, J. (2011). Causality. In: Living Standards Analytics. Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0385-2_5

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