A Crash Course in Good and Bad Controls

Many students of statistics and econometrics express frustration with the way a problem known as “bad control” is treated in the traditional literature. The issue arises when the addition of a variable to a regression equation produces an unintended discrepancy between the regression coefficient and the effect that the coefficient is intended to represent. Avoiding such discrepancies presents a challenge to all analysts in the data intensive sciences. This note describes graphical tools for understanding, visualizing, and resolving the problem through a series of illustrative examples. By making this “crash course” accessible to instructors and practitioners, we hope to avail these tools to a broader community of scientists concerned with the causal interpretation of regression models.