Checking Regression Discontinuity Assumptions (The Effect, Videos on Causality, Ep 64)

Please visit https://www.theeffectbook.net to read The Effect online for free, or find links to purchase a physical copy or ebook.

The Effect is a book about research design and causal inference. How can we use data to learn about the world? How can we answer questions about whether X causes Y even if we can't run a randomized experiment? The book covers these things and plenty more. These videos are meant to accompany the book, although they can also be viewed on their own.

This video relates to material found in Chapter 20 of the book.

A version of this video without background music can be found here: https://youtu.be/AgIH40UeYas

Regression discontinuity is great but it doesn't come for free! There are some important assumptions we need to make for it to work. Thankfully, a lot of those assumptions can be pretty plausibly checked in the actual data to see if they're likely to hold. How can we do that?