Introduction to causal analysis

Question

What are good books that introduce causal analysis? I'm thinking of an introduction that both explains the principles of causal analysis and shows how different statistical methods could be used to apply these principles.

Answer 1

Try Morgan and Winship (2007) for a social science take or Hernan and Robins (forthcoming) for an epidemiological take. Although still in progress, this looks like it's going to be very good.

Morgan and Winship is particularly good on what must be assumed for causal interpretations of regression-type models.

Pearl (2000) is in no sense introductory, although ultimately a very good read. You may find some of his website and specific articles useful, particularly on interpreting structural equation models. They are mostly available as technical reports.

Answer 2

I have very high expectations for Austin Nichols' forthcoming book Causal Inference: Measuring the Effect of x on y. The expected publication date is 2013. In the mean time, his handout and paper provide a nice overview of panel methods, instrumental variables, propensity score matching/reweighting, and regression discontinuity. The comparisons between all these estimators (and RCTs) are especially useful, as well as the Stata mini-tutorials (that can be skipped if you're not a Stata user). Curated references are provided if you want to dig deeper. Unfortunately, there's not very much on structural equations here, though that is also true of the Morgan and Winship book. Their ARS paper is a shorter, though somewhat dated, overview.

I found Pearl to be an interesting, but difficult, introduction to this material. If it was my first exposure to these ideas, I don't know if I would have walked away after reading it knowing how to apply any of the methods very well.

Finally, here are video presentations and slides by economist James Heckman and Pearl from the 2012 Causal Inference Symposium at University of Michigan. Lots of stuff on structural models here.