Mining Causality: AI-Assisted Search for Instrumental Variables
挖掘因果关系:人工智能辅助搜索工具变量
The instrumental variables (IVs) method is a leading empirical strategy for causal inference. Finding IVs is a heuristic and creative process, and justifying their validity---especially exclusion restrictions---is largely rhetorical. We propose using large language models (LLMs) to search for new IVs through narratives and counterfactual reasoning, similar to how a human researcher would. The stark difference, however, is that LLMs can dramatically accelerate this process…