Assistant Professor Claudia Noack, Department of Economics, University of Bonn

"Flexible Covariate Adjustments in Regression Discontinuity Designs"
Friday, 21 February 2025. 15:00-16:30
Room 141A, Adam Smith Business School Building

Abstract

Empirical regression discontinuity (RD) studies often use covariates 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. It involves running a standard RD analysis in which a function of the covariates has been subtracted from the original outcome variable. We characterize the function that leads to the estimator with the smallest asymptotic variance and consider feasible versions of such estimators in which this function is estimated, for example, through modern machine learning techniques.

Bio

Claudia Noack is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research interests lie in Econometrics and especially in Causal Inference and Nonparametric Econometrics. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mannheim and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College and the Department of Economics of the University of Oxford.


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First published: 7 February 2025