‘Metrics Monday: Lagged Explanatory Variables and the Estimation of Causal Effects

I have some good news to share. My paper with Tom Pepinsky and Taka Masaki titled “Lagged Explanatory Variables and the Estimation of Causal Effects” has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics.

Because an image is worth a thousand words, here is one of the key figures in the paper, which illustrates in panel (a) what the problem is with using the lag of an explanatory variable to “exogenize” it, and in panel (b) the hard-to-swallow assumption the needs to be made in order for this trick to work:

Here is a link to the latest version of the paper, and here is the abstract: