"Waiting for Life to Arrive": A history of the regression-discontinuity design in Psychology, Statistics and Economics

Thomas D. Cook*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

203 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper reviews the history of the regression discontinuity design in three academic disciplines. It describes the design's birth and subsequent demise in Psychology even though most problems with it had been solved there. It further describes the scant interest shown in the design by scholars formally trained in Statistics, and the design's poor reception in Economics from 1972 until about 1995, when its profile and acceptance changed. Reasons are given for this checkered history that is characterized as waiting for life to arrive.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)636-654
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Econometrics
Volume142
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2008

Funding

Sween left Northwestern by 1971 but remained a peripheral part of the theory group Campbell organized around RDD in the early 1970s. It would be a mistake to see RDD as a dominant intellectual interest for Campbell at the time. As summarized in Overman (1981) , he was then also involved in many other intellectual pursuits touching on methodology writ large, evaluation, Social Psychology and Epistemology. Nonetheless, RDD was important enough to him that he did spend systematic time on it between 1970 and 1975, with his interest tapering off thereafter until the mid 1980s when it was effectively zero. But in Psychology in the 1970s, the new RDD group included Robert Boruch, Charles Reichardt and eventually, William Trochim. In Mathematics, it included two mathematical statisticians on faculty, Jerome Sacks and Rose Ray, and two graduate students, Clifford Spiegelman and George Knafl. The efforts of the graduate students in Psychology and Mathematics was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to Campbell whose largesse also provided funds for outside visitors to spend up to two summers at Northwestern. One of these visitors was William Lohr who worked on how eligibility for Medicaid, based on household income, affected the number of physician visits in the year Medicaid was passed ( Lohr, 1972 ).

Keywords

  • Economics
  • History of
  • In Psychology
  • Regression discontinuity
  • Statistics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Economics and Econometrics

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