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随机阈值设计中的政策评估：对回归不连续设计的警示AI 解读

Many policies assign treatment according to whether a score crosses a cutoff. Regression discontinuity (RD) designs identify the effect of treatment assignment, but the threshold policy itself may also reshape individuals' incentives, inducing behavioral responses that affect outcomes even holding treatment status fixed---a channel that conventional RD designs cannot capture. We develop a framework that exploits randomized variation in policy thresholds, together with…

回归不连续设计中的通用协变量调整AI 解读

It is standard practice to include covariates in regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) and regression kink designs (RKDs), but the theoretical justification for doing so does not generally extend beyond linear estimands. This paper proposes a novel entropy balancing reweighting approach for covariate adjustment within a general framework of RDDs and RKDs. While conventional regression-based covariate adjustment methods generally fail to deliver consistent estimation for…

断点回归设计中的处理效应异质性检验AI 解读

We propose a nonparametric test for unobserved treatment effect heterogeneity in regression discontinuity designs. Under the null of no unobserved heterogeneity, a transformed outcome that imputes treated potential outcomes for untreated units must have a continuous conditional distribution at the cutoff. We convert this implication into an integrated conditional-moment restriction using characteristic functions, thereby allowing the conditional local average treatment…

断点回归设计中外推治疗效应的界AI 解读

External validity is a central concern in regression discontinuity (RD) designs. To assess treatment effect heterogeneity and the representativeness of the conventional RD estimand, this paper studies the identifying content of monotonicity and smoothness restrictions for treatment effects away from the cutoff in both canonical and multi-cutoff RD designs. In the canonical design, monotonicity in the running variable alone has limited identifying power and generally yields…

存在干扰时的断点回归设计AI 解读

We extend the continuity-based framework to Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDDs) to identify and estimate causal effects under interference when units are connected through a network. Assignment to an "effective treatment," combining the individual treatment and a summary of neighbors' treatments, is determined by the unit's score and those of interfering units, yielding a multiscore RDD with complex, multidimensional boundaries. We characterize these boundaries and…

边界断点设计中的操纵检验AI 解读

We propose the first manipulation test designed for boundary discontinuity designs (BDDs) with general boundary shapes. A BDD is a multidimensional extension of the regression discontinuity design (RDD) in which treatment assignment is determined by whether the multidimensional running variable crosses a lower-dimensional boundary set. The test avoids multivariate density estimation and builds on the observation that, in the absence of manipulation, observations near the…

测地空间中函数型数据与随机对象的回归不连续设计AI 解读

Regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) are widely used for causal inference in observational studies with cutoff-based treatment assignment, primarily for Euclidean outcomes. We propose the geodesic regression discontinuity design (GRDD), which extends RDDs to complex non-Euclidean outcomes, including networks, compositional data, functional data, and other random objects in geodesic metric spaces. Since algebraic operations are unavailable in such spaces, we define the…

PLRD：部分线性断点回归推断AI 解读

Regression discontinuity designs have become one of the most popular research designs in empirical economics. We argue, however, that the widely used approaches to building confidence intervals in regression discontinuity designs often exhibit suboptimal behavior in practice. We propose a new estimator, the partially linear regression discontinuity (PLRD) estimator that, in set of a simulation studies carefully calibrated to twelve high-profile applications of regression…

甜甜圈断点回归设计AI 解读

Donut regression discontinuity (RD) designs exclude observations in a neighborhood around the cutoff. They are widely used in empirical work to address concerns about manipulation, sorting, or measurement error in the running variable. Despite their popularity, donut RD estimators are typically implemented heuristically, with limited formal guidance and unclear implications for bias, variance, and statistical inference. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of donut RD…

右删失结果回归与推断的双重稳健学习器AI 解读

This paper introduces a general framework for doubly robust nonparametric regression with right-censored outcomes, adapting the strategy of the 'DR-learner' for heterogeneous treatment effects to the censored data setting. Our method generalizes censoring unbiased transformations to generate pseudo-outcomes, which serve as inputs for a second-stage nonparametric regression with sample-splitting or cross-fitting. We derive a novel representation of the conditional bias of…

非参数回归的稳健经验似然及其断点回归应用AI 解读

Empirical likelihood serves as a powerful tool for constructing confidence intervals in nonparametric regression and regression discontinuity designs (RDD). The original empirical likelihood framework can be naturally extended to these settings using local linear smoothers, with Wilks' theorem holding only when an undersmoothed bandwidth is selected. However, the generalization of bias-corrected versions of empirical likelihood under more realistic conditions is non-trivial…

利用贝叶斯加性回归树估计断点回归中的条件平均处理效应AI 解读

This paper develops an effective Bayesian approach to conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation in regression discontinuity designs (RDD), an increasingly prevalent form of quasi-experiment that facilitates causal inference. Earlier Bayesian approaches do not easily accommodate CATE estimation while recent frequentist approaches to this problem assume a known basis expansion, a steep model specification requirement that our approach avoids. The new model is a…

安慰剂断点设计AI 解读

Standard regression discontinuity design (RDD) models rely on the continuity of expected potential outcomes at the cutoff. The standard continuity assumption can be violated by strategic manipulation of the running variable, which is realistic when the cutoff is widely known and when the treatment of interest is a social program or government benefit. In this work, we identify the treatment effect despite such a violation, by leveraging a placebo treatment and a placebo…

断点回归设计中的灵活协变量调整AI 解读

Empirical regression discontinuity (RD) studies often include covariates in their specifications 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 existing methods and can accommodate many covariates. Our estimators are simple to implement and involve running a standard RD analysis after subtracting a function of the covariates from the original outcome variable. We…

rd2d：边界断点设计中的因果推断软件AI 解读

Boundary Discontinuity (BD) designs are used in empirical research to learn about causal treatment effects along a continuous assignment boundary defined by a bivariate score. These designs are also known as multi-score regression discontinuity (RD) designs, and include geographic RD designs as a prominent example. This article introduces \pkg{rd2d}, a statistical software package for \proglang{R}, \proglang{Python}, and \proglang{Stata} that implements local polynomial…

动态阈值设计中的非参数因果推断AI 解读

We consider causal inference in dynamic settings where treatment is assigned by thresholding a state variable that can change over time. There is a large literature on regression-discontinuity methods building on the fact that, in the static setting, treatment assignment via threshold crossing induces a quasi-experimental design that enables pragmatic causal inference. But dynamic settings involve challenges not present in the static setting, e.g., past treatments may affect…

模糊断点回归的一类广义有限矩估计量AI 解读

The standard fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) estimator is a ratio of differences of local polynomial estimators. I show that this estimator does not possess any finite integer moments, regardless of local polynomial degree, kernel function, or bandwidth. The estimator is heavy-tailed in small samples or when the treatment probability discontinuity at the cutoff is small. I present a generalized class of FRD estimators which preserves all finite moments from the data,…

干扰下的因果识别：处理分配独立性的作用AI 解读

Empirical researchers routinely invoke the no-interference or \textit{individualistic treatment response} (ITR) assumption to identify causal effects in observational studies, despite concerns that interference across units may arise in many economic settings. This paper studies the causal content of standard ITR-based identification formulas when arbitrary interference is present. We show that, under restrictions on dependence between treatment assignments across units,…

随机前沿模型因果分析的近期进展AI 解读

Causal inference methods (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, etc.) are primary tools used across many social science milieus. One area where their application has lagged however, is in the study of productivity and efficiency. A main reason for this is that the nature of the stochastic frontier model does not immediately lend itself to a causal framework when interest hinges on an error component of the model. This paper reviews the…

含潜变量的多层断点回归模型AI 解读

Regression discontinuity (RD) analysis with latent variables as introduced by Morell et al. (2025), offers a useful augmentation of the conventional RD by incorporating measurement model. This approach is particularly relevant in education research, where noisy proxy (e.g., observed test score) of underlying latent construct is adopted for the running variable. This extension enables extrapolation of average treatment effect (ATE) away from the cutoff score and assessment of…

生存结局的非参数断点回归设计AI 解读

Quasi-experimental evaluations are central for generating real-world causal evidence and complementing insights from randomized trials. The regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a quasi-experimental design that can be used to estimate the causal effect of treatments that are assigned based on a running variable crossing a threshold. Such threshold-based rules are ubiquitous in healthcare, where predictive and prognostic biomarkers frequently guide treatment decisions.…

聚类数据下回归不连续设计的推断AI 解读

Clustered sampling is prevalent in empirical regression discontinuity (RD) designs, but it has not received much attention in the theoretical literature. In this paper, we introduce a general model-based framework for such settings and derive high-level conditions under which the standard local linear RD estimator is asymptotically normal. We verify that our high-level assumptions hold across a wide range of empirical designs, including settings of growing cluster sizes. We…

诱导次序统计量的收敛速率及其应用AI 解读

Induced order statistics (IOS) arise when sample units are reordered according to the value of an auxiliary variable, and the associated responses are analyzed in that induced order. IOS play a central role in applications where the goal is to approximate the conditional distribution of an outcome at a fixed covariate value using observations whose covariates lie closest to that point, including regression discontinuity designs, k-nearest-neighbor methods, and…

改进非参数回归与回归不连续设计的统计推断AI 解读

Nonparametric regression and regression-discontinuity designs suffer from smoothing bias that distorts conventional confidence intervals. Solutions based on robust bias correction (RBC) are now central to the economist's toolbox. In this paper, we establish a novel connection between RBC methods and bootstrap prepivoting. Revisiting RBC through the lens of bootstrapping allows us to develop a novel bias correction procedure which delivers improved nonparametric inference.…