Looking for twins: how to build better counterfactuals with matching
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Stefano Costalli [1] ; Fedra Negri [2]
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[1] University of Florence
University of Florence
Firenze, Italia
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[2] University of Milan
University of Milan
Milán, Italia
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- Localización: Rivista italiana di scienza politica, ISSN 0048-8402, ISSN-e 2057-4908, Vol. 51, Nº. 2, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Capturing Causation: Issues of Research Design in Political Science), págs. 215-230
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
A primary challenge for researchers that make use of observational data is selection bias (i.e. the units of analysis exhibit systematic differences and dis-homogeneities due to non-random selection into treatment). This article encourages researchers in acknowledging this problem and discusses how andmore importantly– under which assumptions they may resort to statistical matching techniques to reduce the imbalance in the empirical distribution of pre-treatment observable variables between the treatment and control groups. With the aim of providing a practical guidance, the article engages with the evaluation of the effectiveness of peacekeeping missions in the case of the Bosnian civil war, a research topic in which selection bias is a structural feature of the observational data researchers have to use, and shows how to apply the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM), the most widely used matching algorithm in the fields of Political Science and International Relations.
