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Testing monotonicity of conditional treatment effects under regression discontinuity designs
Author(s) -
Hsu YuChin,
Shen Shu
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of applied econometrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.878
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 1099-1255
pISSN - 0883-7252
DOI - 10.1002/jae.2805
Subject(s) - regression discontinuity design , monotonic function , econometrics , consistency (knowledge bases) , nonparametric statistics , regression , treatment effect , mathematics , statistics , test (biology) , discontinuity (linguistics) , economics , medicine , geology , mathematical analysis , paleontology , geometry , traditional medicine
Summary Researchers are often interested in the relationship between treatment effects and observed individual heterogeneity. This paper proposes the first nonparametric monotonicity test for conditional treatment effects under the popular regression discontinuity framework. The proposed test examines whether the average treatment effect or the local average treatment effect has a monotonic relationship with some of the observed individual characteristics. We show consistency and asymptotic uniform size control of the proposed test, and apply the test to study treatment effect heterogeneity in two empirical settings.