konfound: Command to quantify robustness of causal inferences

Statistical methods that quantify the discourse about causal inferences in terms of possible sources of biases are becoming increasingly important to many social-science fields such as public policy, sociology, and education. These methods are also known as “robustness or sensitivity analyses”. A series of recent works (Frank 2000, Sociological Methods and Research 29: 147–194; Pan and Frank 2003, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 28: 315– 337; Frank and Min 2007, Sociological Methodology 37: 349–392; and Frank et al. 2013, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 35: 437–460) on robustness analysis extends earlier methods. We implement these recent developments in Stata. In particular, we provide commands to quantify the percent bias necessary to invalidate an inference from a Rubin causal model framework and the robustness of causal inferences in terms of correlations associated with unobserved variables.