Causal Effects of Perceived Immutable Characteristics

By D. James Greiner, Donald B. Rubin. 2011

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Despite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

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In Statistics and Probability

1. Dustin Tingley
2. Teppei Yamamoto
3. Kosuke Imai
4. M. Sen
5. Omar Wasow
6. Judea Pearl
7. Luke Keele
8. Martin Huber

Citations in the corpus

• What We Can't Measure, We Can't Understand: Challenges to Demographic Data Procurement in the Pursuit of Fairness (2020, background): “As pointed to by various scholars [31, 35], for some types of fairness assessment observed race makes sense to use (e.”
• Experimental designs for identifying causal mechanisms (2013, background): “An equivalent assumption was first introduced by Holland (1988) as additivity and later revisited by Robins (2003) for the identification of indirect effects.”
• Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics (2016, methodology): “Second, and perhaps more helpfully, the exposure design can lessen problems of posttreatment bias (Greiner and Rubin 2010), but requires researchers' vigilance.”
• Taste‐Based or Statistical Discrimination: The Economics of Discrimination Returns to its Roots (2013, background): “© 2013 Royal Economic Society. to estimate that causal effect; see also related arguments by Holland (1986); Greiner and Rubin (2011).”