Since the late 90s, Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs have been widely used to estimate Local Average Treatment Effects (LATE). When the running variable is observed with continuous measurement error, identification fails. Assuming non-differential measurement error, we propose a consistent...

Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. If the assignment variable is measured with error, however, the discontinuity in the first stage relationship...

A growing body of evidence suggests large increases in criminal behavior and mortality coinciding with a young adult's 21st birthday, when alcohol consumption becomes legal. The policy implications from these findings have focused on the need to reduce drinking among young people, potentially by...

Researchers are often interested in estimating the causal effect of some treatment on individual criminality. For example, two recent relatively prominent papers have attempted to estimate the respective direct effects of marriage and gang participation on individual criminal activity. One...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

When the running variable in a regression discontinuity (RD) design is measured with error, identification of the local average treatment effect of interest will typically fail. While the form of this measurement error varies across applications, in many cases the measurement error structure is...

It is standard practice in applied work to rely on linear least squares regression to estimate the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") on some outcome of interest. In this paper I study the interpretation of the regression estimand when treatment effects are in fact heterogeneous.I show...

Estimating the rate of return to a university degree has always been difficult due to the problem of omitted variable biases. Benefiting from a special feature of the University Admission system in China, which has clear cutoffs for university entry, combined with a unique data set with...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design. The distributional impacts of social programs such as welfare, education, training programs and unemployment insurance are of large interest to economists. QTE are an...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design (RDD) and proposes simple estimators. Quantile treatment effects are a very helpful tool to characterize the effects of certain interventions on the outcome distribution. The...