Jumpy or Kinky? Regression Discontinuity without the Discontinuity

Yingying Dong

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Regression Discontinuity (RD) models identify local treatment effects by associating a discrete change in the mean outcome with a corresponding discrete change in the probability of treatment at a known threshold of a running variable. This paper shows that it is possible to identify RD model treatment effects without a discontinuity. The intuition is that identification can come from a slope change (a kink) instead of a discrete level change (a jump) in the treatment probability. Formally this can be shown using L'hopital's rule. The identification results are interpreted intuitively using instrumental variable models. Estimators are proposed that can be applied in the presence or absence of a discontinuity, by exploiting either a jump or a kink.

Keywords: Regression Discontinuity; Fuzzy design; Average treatment effect; Identification; Jump; Kink; Threshold (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Jumpy or Kinky? Regression Discontinuity without the Discontinuity (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:25461

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