New Developments in Regression Discontinuity Designs: Covariates Adjustment and Coverage Optimal Inference

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This project proposes a novel approach to incorporate covariates in regression discontinuity (RD) designs. It represents the covariate balance condition as over-identifying moment restrictions. The empirical likelihood (EL) RD estimator efficiently incorporates the information from covariate balance and has an asymptotic variance no larger than that of the standard estimator without covariates. This project then proposes a robust corrected EL confidence set which achieves a faster coverage error decay rate. The coverage accuracy of the proposed confidence interval is automatically robust against slight perturbation to the covariate balance condition, which may happen in cases such as data contamination and misspecified “unaffected” outcomes used as covariates. This project also propose a way to conduct sensitivity analysis in the bandwidth choice when the researcher wants to use regression discontinuity with covariate adjustment. This project conducts Monte Carlo simulations to assess the finite-sample performance of the proposed inference method and then applies it to a real dataset.