Regression and Causation: A Critical Examination of Six Econometrics Textbooks
Bryant Chen, Judea Pearl · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2013
This report surveys six influential econometric textbooks in terms of their math-ematical treatment of causal concepts. It highlights conceptual and notational differ-ences among the authors and points to areas where they deviate significantly from modern standards of causal analysis. We find that econonometric textbooks vary from complete denial to partial acceptance of the causal content of econometric equations and, uniformly, fail to provide coherent mathematical notation that distinguishes causal from statistical concepts. This survey also provides a panoramic view of the state of causal thinking in econometric education which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been surveyed before. 1