31 October Seminar: COVID-19 is (Probably) Not an Exogenous Shock or Valid Instrument
For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2024 series we are pleased to welcome Jeff Clement (Augsburg University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 31 October at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. For our attendees outside of Europe, please note that Central European Summer Time has ended, you can check the seminar time in your time zone here. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
Working Paper available here
Empirical investigations of many information systems phenomena are complicated by endogeneity. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a wide range of policy and societal changes that seem to present a natural experiment. Researchers have attempted to use these changes, such as mandated closures of non-essential businesses, as exogenous shocks or instrumental variables in causal inference, with the goal of evaluating a theory or phenomenon not related to the pandemic. However, the rationale that the Covid-19 response prompted changes (such as business and school closures) that were decided by an agent “outside the unit of analysis” is not sufficient to meet the criteria for exogeneity. We concisely describe and demonstrate via simulation that the wide-ranging impacts of Covid-19—which were driven by politics, personality, and socioeconomics, and implemented in bundles—violate the parallel trends assumption for difference-in-differences analyses and the exclusion restriction for instrumental variable analyses. Our hope is that this analysis helps IS researchers avoid such problems moving forward.
About the Speaker
Jeff Clement is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the School of Business and Economics at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. His research explores topics in healthcare (especially related to emergency/pre-hospital care and pharmaceuticals), AI-augmented decisions, and the intersection of those topics. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota.