Length of exposure to instruction in a training program is important in determining the labor market outcomes of participants. Employing methods to estimate the causal effects from continuous treatments, we provide insights regarding the effects of different lengths of exposure to academic and vocational instruction in Job Corps (JC)—America’s largest and most comprehensive job training program...

Motivated by the need to meaningfully implement the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) definition of health care disparity, this paper proposes statistical frameworks that lay out explicitly the needed causal assumptions for defining disparity measures. Our key emphasis is that a scientifically defensible disparity measure must take into account the direction of the causal relationship between all...

During the past 20 years, social scientists using observational studies have generated a large and inconclusive literature on neighborhood effects. Recent workers have argued that estimates of neighborhood effects based on randomized studies of housing mobility, such as the “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO) demonstration, are more credible. These estimates are based on the implicit assumption of no...

This paper describes a targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) for the parameters of longitudinal static and dynamic marginal structural models. We consider a longitudinal data structure consisting of baseline covariates, time-dependent intervention nodes, intermediate time-dependent covariates, and a possibly time-dependent outcome. The intervention nodes at each time point can include a ...

Recent developments in structural equation modeling have produced several methods that can usually distinguish cause from effect in the two-variable case. For that purpose, however, one has to impose substantial structural constraints or smoothness assumptions on the functional causal models. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining the causal direction from a related but different...

Accurate measurement of the marginal healthcare costs associated with different diseases and health conditions is important, especially for increasingly prevalent conditions such as obesity. However, existing observational study designs cannot identify the causal impact of disease on healthcare costs. This paper explores the possibilities for causal inference offered by Mendelian randomization,...

Auto ownership is a critical mediating link in the connection between the built environment and travel behavior: the built environment presumably influences auto ownership, which in turn impacts travel behavior. However, the way in which individual elements of the built environment affect auto-ownership choices is far from understood. Further, residential self-selection may confound the interac...

Let X denote the feature and Y the target. We consider domain adaptation under three possible scenarios: (1) the marginal PY changes, while the conditional PX|Y stays the same (target shift), (2) the marginal PY is fixed, while the conditional PX|Y changes with certain constraints (conditional shift), and (3) the marginal PY changes, and the conditional PX|Y changes with constraints (generalize...

BACKGROUND Patients with personality disorders commonly exhibit impairment in psychosocial function that persists over time even with diagnostic remission. Further causal knowledge may help to identify and assess factors with a potential to alleviate this impairment. Psychosocial function is associated with personality functioning which describes personality disorder severity in DSM-5 (section ...