It is a dull day when there is not at least one media report of a claim that research has identified some new environmental cause of disease. Such claimed causes concern a wide range of supposed hazards including medical interventions such as the measlesmumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, the thimerasol (mercury) preservative in other vaccines, dietary factors of many different kinds (coffee, alcohol,...

In this paper we apply the method of inferred causation for macroeconomic analysis. First we introduce briefly the theory of inferred causation developed by Pearl and Verma (1991). We apply this method to the identification of structural vector autoregression (SVAR) models. In an example of monetary policy analysis we demonstrate how causal information embedded in the data can be used to identi...

We consider a hierarchy of queries about causal relationships in graphical models, where each level in the hierarchy requires more detailed information than the one below. The hierarchy consists of three levels: associative relationships, derived from a joint distribution over the observable variables; cause-effect relationships, derived from distributions resulting from external interventions;...