[Editor’s note: this post is contributed by Natalia Bueno and Guadalupe Tuñón.]
During the last decade, an increasing number of political scientists have turned to regression-discontinuity (RD) designs to estimate causal effects. Although the growth of RD designs has stimulated a wide discussion about RD assumptions and estimation strategies, there is no single shared approach to guide empirical applications. One of the major issues in RD designs involves selection of the “window” or “bandwidth” — the values of the running variable that define the set of units included in the RD study group. [i]
This choice is key for RD designs, as results are often sensitive to bandwidth size. Indeed, even those who propose particular methods to choose a given window agree that “irrespective of the manner in which the bandwidth is chosen, one should always investigate the sensitivity of the inferences to this choice. […] [I]f the results…
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Ana I. Moreno-Monroy 