Principal Stratification and Attribution Prohibition: Good Ideas Taken Too Far

Joffe Marshall

The International Journal of Biostatistics, 2011, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Pearl’s article provides a useful springboard for discussing further the benefits and drawbacks of principal stratification and the associated discomfort with attributing effects to post-treatment variables. The basic insights of the approach are important: pay close attention to modification of treatment effects by variables not observable before treatment decisions are made, and be careful in attributing effects to variables when counterfactuals are ill-defined. These insights have often been taken too far in many areas of application of the approach, including instrumental variables, censoring by death, and surrogate outcomes. A novel finding is that the usual principal stratification estimand in the setting of censoring by death is by itself of little practical value in estimating intervention effects.

Keywords: principal stratification; causal inference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.2202/1557-4679.1367

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