https://claude.site/artifacts/7a24b8aa-a0f2-4a52-8d3e-8a96b9d13fe0

If you ever find yourself watching someone present their economic research, you’ll hear questions from the audience like — and What is your identification strategy? Or, Under what assumptions are you identified? After sitting through a couple of these presentations, you’ll realize that Identification is a really big deal to Economists.

So what is Identification?

A recent(ish?) paper, attempting to define the term as simple as possible, begins with the following line:

<aside>

“Econometric Identification really means just one thing: are the model parameters or features uniquely determined from the observable population that generates the data."

</aside>

You likely have two initial thoughts — (1) That’s as simple as it can be explained? and (2) What is the observable population? — good questions!

A few paragraphs later the paper rephrases the line:

<aside>

“Roughly, identification asks, if we knew the population that data are drawn from, would $\theta$ be known? And if not, what could be learned about $\theta$?”

</aside>

Your two thoughts now are — (1) That kinda resembles what we’ve done when we discussed randomized control trials, right? We acted as if we observed the entire population. (2) Why did the author drop the term “observable”? Is it not that important?