Distributional Tests for Regression Discontinuity: Theory and Empirical Examples

Shu Shen; Xiaohan Zhang

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00595

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Distributional Tests for Regression Discontinuity: Theory and Empirical Examples

Shu Shen¹; Xiaohan Zhang²

¹ University of California, Davis · ² California State University Los Angeles

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2016

This paper proposes consistent testing methods for examining the effect of a policy treatment on the whole distribution of a response outcome within the setting of a regression discontinuity design. These methods are particularly useful when a policy is expected to produce treatment effects that are heterogeneous along some unobserved characteristics. The test statistics are Kolmogorov-Smirnov-type and are asymptotically distribution free when the data are i.i.d. The proposed tests are applied to three seminal RD studies (Pop-Eleches & Urquiola, 2013; Abdulkadiroglu, Angrist, & Pathak, 2014; and Battistin et al., 2009).

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00595
Volume: 98 (4)
Pages: 685-700
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
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