Claudia Noack: Flexible Covariate Adjustments in Regression Discontinuity Designs (with Tomasz Olma and Christoph Rothe)
Empirical regression discontinuity (RD) studies often use covariates to increase the precision of their estimates. In this paper, we propose a novel class of estimators that use such covariate information more efficiently than the linear adjustment estimators that are currently used widely in practice. Our approach can accommodate a possibly large number of either discrete or continuous covariates. It involves running a standard RD analysis with an appropriately modified outcome variable, which takes the form of the difference between the original outcome and a function of the covariates.
We characterize the function that leads to the estimator with the smallest asymptotic variance, and show how it can be estimated via modern machine learning, nonparametric regression, or classical parametric methods. The resulting estimator is easy to implement, as tuning parameters can be chosen as in a conventional RD analysis. An extensive simulation study illustrates the performance of our approach.
Date: 5 November 2021, 14:15 (Friday, 4th week, Michaelmas 2021)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room C or Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/95783544125?pwd=WnpBTW1DWStZV1lkVlE0dm83Y3JsUT09
Speaker: Claudia Noack (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Nuffield Econometrics Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Emma Heritage