Christian Tien

Christian Tien

Econometrician

QuantCo

About

I obtained my PhD in Economics at the University of Cambridge. When it comes to research, I most enjoy coming up with creative approaches to interesting (economic) identification problems.

In my thesis, I developed a novel identification and estimation framework based on the idea of “deconfounding” partially endogenous instruments with respect to “common” confounders. This new framework draws inspiration from the recent proximal learning and more traditional instrumental variable literature.

Interests
  • Causal Inference
  • Semiparametric Estimation
  • Machine Learning
Education
  • PhD in Economics, 2024

    University of Cambridge

  • MPhil in Economic Research, 2019

    University of Cambridge

  • BA in Economics, 2018

    University of Cambridge

Papers

Relaxing Instrument Exclusion with Common Confounders
Relaxing Instrument Exclusion with Common Confounders

Finding excluded (and exogenous) instruments is hard. We consider the situation where instruments are excluded only conditional on some unobserved common confounders, for which relevant proxies exist. Using insights from proximal learning, we can identify exogenous variation in the instruments to then identify a causal effect of a treament on an outcome. All our relevance assumptions are testable, while as usual in IV, the assumption of exclusion conditional on unobservables is not (up to specification tests). Importantly, exclusion conditional on unobservables for which proxies exist may be a weaker assumption than exclusion conditional on observables only.

Selected Talks

American Causal Inference Conference 2023
Received Tom Ten Have Award honorable mention for poster presentation of Relaxing Instrument Exclusion with Common Confounders.
American Causal Inference Conference 2023
EEA-ESEM 2022
Presented Instrumented Common Confounding in the session Identification of Treatment Effects.
EEA-ESEM 2022
American Causal Inference Conference 2022
Presented Instrumented Common Confounding for the first time as a poster.
American Causal Inference Conference 2022