ArticleSociological methods & research2022
The Future Strikes Back: Using Future Treatments to Detect and Reduce Hidden Bias.
Article in Sociological methods & research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Childhood fluoride exposure and cognition across the life course.Science advances · 2025Article
- Association Between Rental Assistance Programs and Undiagnosed Diabetes Among U.S.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Article
- Recent Developments in Causal Inference and Machine Learning.Annual review of sociology · 2023Article
- The Effects of Rental Assistance Programs on Neighborhood Outcomes for U.S. Children: Nationwide Evidence by Program and Race/Ethnicity.Urban affairs review (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) · 2023Article
- Association Between Rental Assistance Programs and Hemoglobin A1c Levels Among US Adults.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- The Benefits of Rental Assistance for Children's Health and School Attendance in the United States.Demography · 2021Article
- To Adjust or Not to Adjust? When a "Confounder" Is Only Measured After Exposure.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved confounder that affects treatment also affects the future value of the treatment. Future treatments thus proxy for the unmeasured confounder, and researchers can exploit these proxy measures productively. We establish several new results: Regarding a commonly assumed data-generating process involving future treatments, we (1) introduce a simple new approach and show that it strictly reduces bias, (2) elaborate on existing approaches and show that they can increase bias, (3) assess the relative merits of alternative approaches, and (4) analyze true state dependence and selection as key challenges. (5) Importantly, we also introduce a new nonparametric test that uses future treatments to detect hidden bias even when future-treatment estimation fails to reduce bias. We illustrate these results empirically with an analysis of the effect of parental income on children's educational attainment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.