TY  - JOUR
AU  - Imbens,Guido
AU  - Lemieux,Thomas
TI  - Regression Discontinuity Designs: A Guide to Practice
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Technical Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 337
PY  - 2007
Y2  - April 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/t0337
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/t0337.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Guido Imbens
Department of Economics
Littauer Center
Harvard University
1805 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/384-7485
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: imbens@fas.harvard.edu

Thomas Lemieux
Department of Economics
University of British Columbia
#997-1873 East Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Canada
Tel: 604/822-2092
Fax: 604/822-5915
E-Mail: tlemieux@interchange.ubc.ca
AB  - In Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for evaluating causal effects of interventions, assignment to a treatment is determined at least partly by the value of an observed covariate lying on either side of a fixed threshold. These designs were first introduced in the evaluation literature by Thistlewaite and Campbell (1960). With the exception of a few unpublished theoretical papers, these methods did not attract much attention in the economics literature until recently. Starting in the late 1990s, there has been a large number of studies in economics applying and extending RD methods. In this paper we review some of the practical and theoretical issues involved in the implementation of RD methods.
ER  -