Causal Design

Triage any causal question to the identification strategy the data can support, then hand off to the owning method skill; owns the selection-on-observables branch (overlap, doubly robust estimation, double ML, causal forests, policy learning, sensitivity analysis) and the inference rules shared across designs. Produces the design recommendation with the assumption that licenses it, the estimand and its subpopulation, R estimation code for the observables branch, and a drafted taxonomy paragraph. TRIGGER on "causal inference", "identification strategy", "which method", "research design", "endogeneity", "quasi-experiment", "natural experiment", "observational study", "selection on observables", "unconfoundedness", "conditional ignorability", "matching", "propensity score", "doubly robust", "AIPW", "double machine learning", "DML", "causal forest", "CATE", "policy learning", "targeting", "sensitivity analysis", "omitted variable bias", "Oster bounds", "coefficient stability", "overlap", "trimming", "marketplace experiment", "surrogate index", "mediation", "mediation analysis", "indirect effect", or any "how do I estimate the effect of X on Y" question with no design chosen yet. Once a design is chosen, the method skills own it: field-experiment, did, synthetic-control, rdd, iv.

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/causal-design
curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/causal-design/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.claude/skills/causal-design/SKILL.md

@misc{causal-design-2026,
  author    = {ericluo04},
  title     = {Causal Design [Claude Code skill]},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {ClaudSkills},
  url       = {https://claudskills.com/skills/causal-design/}
}