Free Discontinuity Regression: With an Application to the Economic Effects of Internet Shutdowns

Florian Gunsilius and David Van Dijcke

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Discontinuities in regression functions can reveal important insights. In many contexts, like geographic settings, such discontinuities are multivariate and unknown a priori. We propose a non-parametric regression method that estimates the location and size of discontinuities by segmenting the regression surface. This estimator is based on a convex relaxation of the Mumford-Shah functional, for which we establish identification and convergence. We use it to show that an internet shutdown in India resulted in a reduction of economic activity by 25--35%, greatly surpassing previous estimates and shedding new light on the true cost of such shutdowns for digital economies globally.

Date: 2023-09, Revised 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14630 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:arx:papers:2309.14630

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().