《RegressionDiscontinuity回归中断》-课件设计（公开）.pptVIP

* * * * * * * Regression Discontinuity Basic Idea Sometimes whether something happens to you or not depends on your ‘score’ on a particular variable e.g You get a scholarship if you get above a certain mark in an exam, you get given remedial education if you get below a certain level, a policy is implemented if it gets more than 50% of the vote in a ballot, your sentence for a criminal offence is higher if you are above a certain age (an ‘adult’) All these are potential applications of the ‘regression discontinuity’ design More formally.. assignment to treatment depends in a discontinuous way on some observable variable W simplest form has assignment to treatment being based on W being above some critical value w0- the discontinuity method of assignment to treatment is the very opposite to that in random assignment – it is a deterministic function of some observable variable. But, assignment to treatment is as ‘good as random’ in the neighbourhood of the discontinuity – this is hard to grasp but I hope to explain it Basics of RDD Estimator Suppose average outcome in absence of treatment conditional on W is: Suppose average outcome with treatment conditional on W is: This is ‘full outcomes’ approach. Treatment effect conditional on W is g1(W)-g0(W): How can we estimate this? Basic idea is to compare outcomes just to the left and right of discontinuity i.e. to compare: As δ→0 this comes to: i.e. treatment effect at W=w0 Comments the RDD estimator compares the outcome of people who are just on both sides of the discontinuity - difference in means between these two groups is an estimate of the treatment effect at the discontinuity says nothing about the treatment effect away from the discontinuity - this is a limitation of the RDD effect. An important assumption is that underlying effect on W on outcomes is continuous so only reason for discontinuity is treatment effect Some pictures – underlying relationship between y and W is linear E(y│W) w0 W Now introd