STICERD Econometrics Seminar Series
TUESDAY Seminar: Estimation and Inference in Boundary Discontinuity Designs
Matias Cattaneo (Princeton), joint with Rocio Titiunik and Ruiqi (Rae) Yu
Tuesday 20 May 2025 14:00 - 15:30
This event is both online and in person
SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH
Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.
Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.
Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.
About this event
Boundary Discontinuity designs are used to learn about treatment effects along a continuous boundary that splits units into control and treatment groups according to a bivariate score variable. These research designs are also called Multi-Score Regression Discontinuity designs, a leading special case being Geographic Regression Discontinuity designs. We study the statistical properties of commonly used local polynomial treatment effects estimators along the continuous treatment assignment boundary. We consider two distinct approaches: one based explicitly on the bivariate score variable for each unit, and the other based on their univariate distance to the boundary. For each approach, we present pointwise and uniform estimation and inference methods for the treatment effect function over the assignment boundary. Importantly, we show that methods based on univariate distance to the boundary exhibit an irreducible large misspecification bias when the assignment boundary has kinks or other irregularities, making the distance-based approach unsuitable for empirical work in those settings. In contrast, methods based on the bivariate score variable do not suffer from that drawback. We illustrate our methods with an empirical application and simulations. Companion general-purpose software is provided.
STICERD Econometrics seminars are held on Thursdays in term time at 14.00-15.30, in SAL 3.05, unless specified otherwise.
Seminar organisers: Dr Yike Wang, Professor Tai Otsu, and Dr Vassilis Hajivassiliou.
For further information please contact Sadia Ali: s.ali43@lse.ac.uk.
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This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.
The building is labelled SAL on the map. Enter the building via Lincoln's Inn Fields.
