Finding Exogenous Variation in Data

Abstract

We reconsider the classic problem of recovering exogenous variation from an endogenous regressor. Two-stage least squares recovers exogenous variation through presuming the existence of an instrumental variable. We rely instead on the assumption that the regressor is a mixture of exogenous and endogenous observations--say as the result of temporary natural experiments. With this assumption, we propose an alternative two-stage method based on nonparametrically estimating a mixture model to recover a subset of the exogenous observations. We demonstrate that our method recovers exogenous observations in simulation and can be used to find pricing experiments hidden in grocery store scanner data.