Regression Kink Design: Theory and Practice
David Card,
David S. Lee,
Zhuan Pei and
Andrea Weber
No 22781, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this paper, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in Austria, and discuss implementation issues that may arise in similar settings, including the use of bandwidth selection algorithms and bias-correction procedures. Although recent developments in nonparametric estimation (e.g. Imbens et al. (2012) and Calonico et al. (2014)) are sometimes interpreted by practitioners as pointing to a default estimation procedure, we show that in any given application different procedures may perform better or worse. In particular, Monte Carlo simulations based on data generating processes that closely resemble the data from our application show that some asymptotically dominant procedures may actually perform worse than “sub-optimal” alternatives in a given empirical application.
JEL-codes: C2 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-lab
Note: LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22781.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Chapter: Regression Kink Design: Theory and Practice (2017) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22781
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22781
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().