What No First Stage Can Detect: Functional-Form Contamination in Linear IV
第一阶段无法检测什么:线性工具变量中的函数形式污染
Applied instrumental variables (IV) practice reports a first-stage F, now often the conditional F of Sanderson and Windmeijer (2016), and reads a large value as license to interpret the second stage. We show that no first-stage diagnostic can provide it. With a scalar instrument, a scalar treatment, and covariates entered linearly, the 2SLS estimand splits into a signal that a saturated specification would target and a contamination, the covariance between curvature in the…