Return of the phantom menace: Omitted variable bias in political research

Conflict Management and Peace Science

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 46-66

  Clarke, Kevin A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

Control variables; Model specification; Omitted variable bias; Research design

Indexed keywords

EID: 60349089093     PISSN: 07388942     EISSN: 15499219     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0738894208097666     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Achen, Christopher H. 1992. Social psychology, demographic variables, and linear regression: Breaking the iron triangle in voting research. Political Behavior 14 (September): 195-211.
2. Achen, Christopher H. 2002. Toward a new political methodology: Microfoundations and ART. Annual Review of Political Science 5: 423-450.
3. Achen, Christopher H. 2005. Let's put garbage-can regressions and garbage-can probits where they belong. Conflict Management and Peace Science 22 (4). 327-339.
4. Akaike, H. 1973. Information theory and an extension of the likelihood ratio principle. In Second International Symposium of Information Theory, eds B. N. Petrov and F. Csaki, pp. 267-281. Budapest: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
5. Altonji, Joseph G., Todd E. Elder, and Christopher R. Taber. 2005. Selection on observed and unobserved variables: Assessing the effectiveness of Catholic schools. Journal of Political Economy 113 (February): 151-184.
6. Ansolabehere, Stephen, Alan Gerber, and Jim Snyder. 2002. Equal votes, equal money: Court-ordered redistricting and public expenditures in the American states. American Political Science Review 96 (December): 767-777.
7. Bailey, Michael A., Brian Kamoie, and Forrest Maltzman. 2005. Signals from the Tenth Justice: The political role of the Solicitor General in Supreme Court decision making. American Journal of Political Science 49 (January): 72-85.
8. Brady, Henry E., and John E. McNulty. 2004. The costs of voting: Evidence from a natural experiment. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Political Methodology, Stanford University.
9. Breiman, Leo. 1992. The little bootstrap and other methods for dimensionality selection in regression: X-fixed prediction error. Journal of the American Statistical Association 87 (September): 738-754.
10. Buhaug, Halvard, and Scott Gates. 2002. The geography of civil war. Journal of Peace Research 39 (July): 417-433.
11. Clarke, Kevin A. 2001. Testing nonnested models of international relations: Reevaluating realism. American Journal of Political Science 45 (July): 724-744.
12. Clarke, Kevin A. 2003. Nonparametric model discrimination in international relations. Journal of Conflict Resolution 47 (February): 72-93.
13. Clarke, Kevin A. 2005. The phantom menace: Omitted variable bias in econometric research. Conflict Management and Peace Science 22 (Winter): 341-352.
14. Clarke, Kevin A. 2007. A simple distribution-free test for nonnested hypotheses. Political Analysis 15 (Summer): 347-363.
15. Cornfield, J.W. Haenszel, E.C. Hammond, A.M. Lilienfeld, M.B. Shimkin, and E.L. Wynder. 1959. Smoking and lung cancer: Recent evidence and a discussion of some questions. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 22 (1). 173-203.
16. Cox, David R. 1961. Tests of separate families of hypotheses. Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Symposium I: 105-123.
17. Cramer, J.S. 2003. Logit models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
18. Davidson, Russell, and James G. MacKinnon. 1993. Estimation and inference in econometrics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19. Gail, M.H., S. Wieand, and S. Piantadosi. 1984. Biased estimates of treatment effect in randomized experiments with nonlinear regressions and omitted covariates. Biometrika 71 (December): 431-444.
20. Gelpi, Christopher, and Peter D. Feaver. 2002. Speak softly and carry a big stick? Veterans in the political elite and the American use of force. American Political Science Review 96 (December): 779-793.
21. Greene, William H. 2003. Econometric analysis, 5 th edn. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
22. Griliches, Zvi. 1977. Estimating the results to schooling: Some econometric problems. Econometric 45 (January): 1-22.
23. Gujarati, Damodar N. 2003. Basic econometrics, 4 th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.
24. Hanushek, Eric A., and John E. Jackson. 1977. Statistical methods for social scientists. New York: Academic Press.
25. Hegre, Havard, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch. 2001. Toward a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816-1992. American Political Science Review 95 (March): 33-48.
26. Hendry, David F., and Jean-Francois Richard. 1982. On the formulation of empirical models in dynamic econometrics. Journal of Econometrics 20 (October): 3-33.
27. Holland, Paul W. 1986. Statistics and causal inference. Journal of the American Statistical Association 81 (December): 945-960.
28. Imbens, Guido W. 2003. Sensitivity to exogeneity assumptions in program evaluation. American Economic Review 93 (May): 126-132.
29. Johnston, Jack, and John DiNardo. 1997. Econometric methods, 4 th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.
30. Judge, George G., W.E. Griffiths, R. Carter Hill, Helmut Lutkepohl, and Tsoung-Chao Lee. 1985. The theory and practice of econometrics, 2 nd edn. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
31. King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
32. King, Gary, James Honaker, Anne Joseph, and Kenneth Scheve. 2001. Analyzing incomplete political science data: An alternative algorithm for multiple imputation. American Political Science Review 95 (March): 49-69.
33. Kmenta, Jan. 1986. Elements of econometrics, 2 nd edn. New York: Macmillan.
34. Krause, George A. 2003. Coping with uncertainty: analyzing risk propensities of SEC budgetary decisions, 1949-97. American Political Science Review 97 (February): 171-188.
35. Maddala, G.S. 1977. Econometrics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
36. Mallows, C.L. 1973. Some comments on Cp. Technometrics 15 (November): 671-676.
37. McCullagh, P., and J.A. Nelder. 1989. Generalized linear models, 2 nd edn. New York: Chapman and Hall.
38. Meyer, Bruce D. 1995. Natural and quasi-experiments in economics. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 13 (April): 151-161.
39. Neuhaus, John M. 1993. A geometric approach to assess bias due to omitted covariates in generalized linear models. Biometrika 80 (December): 807-815.
40. Rosenbaum, Paul R. 1986. Dropping out of high school in the United States: An observational study. Journal of Educational Statistics 11 (Autumn): 207-224.
41. Rosenbaum, Paul R. 2002. Observational Studies, 2 nd edn. New York: Springer-Verlag.
42. Rosenbaum, P.R., and D.B. Rubin. 1983. Assessing sensitivity to an unobserved binary covariate in an observational study with binary outcome. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 45 (2). 212-218.
43. Rudolph, Thomas J., and Jillian Evans. 2005. Political trust, ideology, and public support for government spending. American Journal of Political Science 49 (July): 660-671.
44. Schwarz, G. 1978. Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals of Statistics 6: 461-464.
45. Sims, Christopher A. 1980. Macroeconomics and reality. Econometrica 48 (January): 1-48.
46. Stein, C. 1955. Inadmissibility of the usual estimator for the mean of a multivariate normal distribution. Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, pp. 197-206.
47. Vuong, Quang. 1989. Likelihood ratio tests for model selection and non-nested hypotheses. Econometrica 57 (March): 307-333.
48. Welch, Finis. 1975. Human capital theory: Education, discrimination, and life-cycles. American Economic Review 65 (May): 63-73.
49. Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 2002. Econometric analysis of cross section and panel data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.