- Photo
- —
- Name
- —
- Authors
- David S. Lee and Thomas Lemieux
- Year
- 2010
- Field
- Econometrics / Causal inference
- One-line gist
- A tour of regression discontinuity designs and how to treat arbitrary cutoffs like nature’s randomized trials.
- Why I care
- If you work with messy policy data, this is the closest you get to sorcery without p-hacking.
- Best stat or figure
- Those jump-at-the-cutoff plots where one side of the line looks like it’s living in a different universe.
- Difficulty
- Medium-hard; the intuition lands fast, the assumptions take a few re-reads.
- Where to read
- Journal of Economic Literature; also floating around as a PDF from various universities.
- My take
- This is the paper that made me see every score cutoff—test scores, credit scores, you name it—as a potential natural experiment.
TheLysts
