Identification of Causal Mechanisms through an RD Approach

Viviana Celli ()
Additional contact information
Viviana Celli: Department of Social Sciences and Economics, Sapienza University of Rome

No 15/20, Working Papers from Sapienza University of Rome, DISS

Abstract: Causal Mediation Analysis has important implications in economics. It helps to deeply understand the policy makers' decisions and to better de- sign policy strategies. However, the identification process is not an easy issue and analyzing causal mechanisms requires stronger assumptions than evaluating the classical average treatment effect. The main difficulty con- sists in the endogeneity of the mediator with the consequence that it is not possible to identify the effects of interest. Several methods have been de- veloped, based on different set of assumptions and with different strategies for the estimation. I propose a new identification strategy for the estima- tion of the direct and the indirect effect, through an implementation of a Regression Discontinuity Design. I present two different models. The first one follows the traditional identification strategy based on linear equation models. The second model follows the most recent literature based on non- parametric identification procedures. I show the consistency of this last estimator, validating the results through a Monte Carlo simulation study.

Keywords: Mediation Analysis; Regression Discontinuity Design; Direct effect; Indirect effect; Non-parametric identification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 C54 D04 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.diss.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/al ... _Celli_wp15_2020.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.diss.uniroma1.it:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

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:saq:wpaper:15/20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Sapienza University of Rome, DISS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pierluigi Montalbano ().