Lecture 14 Zimmerman 2014

Zimmerman 2014

• Zimmerman 2014 uses a cutoff in the admissions process to estimate the returns to education for academically marginal students
• Today we will be discussing that paper

Zimmerman 2014

First off:

• What does he look for and what does he find?
• Why might we be particularly interested in the returns to education for marginal students?
• How do we know that RDD gives us the return for those students?
• What kind of RDD is this?
• How can we characterize his results and any strengths/weaknesses?

Zimmerman 2014

• Why does he check for manipulation of the running variable in Section V.A?
• Why might this be important?
• What does manipulation mean and why might it mess up an RDD result?
• How does he do this check?

Running Variable Notes

• We can do these sorts of tests ourselves for manipulation using the rddensity() and rdplotdensity() functions in the rddensity package
• Other potential issues with running variables: granularity
• Why might it be difficult to do an RDD if the running variable is very coarsely defined?

Zimmerman 2014

• What other tests does he do?
• What does Figure 3 show us?
• How can we get the results from the graphs and from the regression tables?
• Is there anything we might want to do differently in this study?