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Journal article

Including Covariates in the Regression Discontinuity Design

  • Frölich, Markus Center for Evaluation and Development (C4ED), University of Mannheim
  • Huber, Martin Department of Economics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
    2019
Published in:
  • Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. - 2019, vol. 37, no. 4, p. 736-748
Causal effect
Complier
Endogeneity
LATE
Nonparametric regression
Treatment effect
English This article proposes a fully nonparametric kernel method to account for observed covariates in regression discontinuity designs (RDD), which may increase precision of treatment effect estimation. It is shown that conditioning on covariates reduces the asymptotic variance and allows estimating the treatment effect at the rate of one- dimensional nonparametric regression, irrespective of the dimension of the continuously distributed elements in the conditioning set. Furthermore, the proposed method may decrease bias and restore identification by controlling for discontinuities in the covariate distribution at the discontinuity threshold, provided that all relevant discontinuously distributed variables are controlled for. To illustrate the estimation approach and its properties, we provide a simulation study and an empirical application to an Austrian labor market reform. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Department
Département d'économie politique
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/309275
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