scholarly journals The Impact of 'Equal Educational Opportunity' Funds: A Regression Discontinuity Design

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin Ooghe
Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 2582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Lotsu ◽  
Yuichiro Yoshida ◽  
Katsufumi Fukuda ◽  
Bing He

Confronting an energy crisis, the government of Ghana enacted a power factor correction policy in 1995. The policy imposes a penalty on large-scale electricity users, namely, special load tariff (SLT) customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), whose power factor is below 90%. This paper investigates the impact of this policy on these firms’ power factor improvement by using panel data from 183 SLT customers from 1994 to 1997 and from 2012. To avoid potential endogeneity, this paper adopts a regression discontinuity design (RDD) with the power factor of the firms in the previous year as a running variable, with its cutoff set at the penalty threshold. The result shows that these large-scale electricity users who face the penalty because their power factor falls just short of the threshold are more likely to improve their power factor in the subsequent year, implying that the power factor correction policy implemented by Ghana’s government is effective.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Bonander ◽  
Debora Stranges ◽  
Johanna Gustavsson ◽  
Matilda Almgren ◽  
Malin Inghammar ◽  
...  

Objectives: To study the impact of non-mandatory, age-specific social distancing recommendations for older adults (70+ years) in Sweden on isolation behaviors and disease outcomes during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Our study relies on self-reported isolation data from COVID Symptom Study Sweden (n = 96,053) and national register data on COVID-19 hospitalizations, deaths, and confirmed cases. We use a regression discontinuity design to account for confounding factors, exploiting the fact that exposure to the recommendation was a discontinuous function of age. Results: By comparing individuals just above to those just below the age limit for the policy, our analyses revealed a sharp drop in the weekly number of visits to crowded places at the 70-year-threshold (-13%). Severe COVID-19 cases (hospitalizations or deaths) also dropped abruptly by 16% at the 70-year-threshold. Our data suggest that the age-specific recommendations prevented approximately 1,800 to 2,700 severe COVID-19 cases, depending on model specification. Conclusion: The non-mandatory, age-specific recommendations helped control the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daxin Dong ◽  
Xiaowei Xu ◽  
Yat Wong

Prior studies have suggested the existence of a reverse causality relationship between air quality and tourism development: while air quality influences tourism, dynamic segments of the tourism industry (e.g., cruising, airline, foodservice) have impacts on air quality. This reverse causality hinders a precise estimate on the effect of air pollution on tourism development within a conventional econometric framework, since the variable of air pollution is endogenous. This study estimates the impact of air pollution on the inbound tourism industry in China, by controlling for endogeneity based on a regression discontinuity design (RDD). The estimate is derived from a quasi-experiment generated by China’s Huai River Policy, which subsidizes coal for winter heating in northern Chinese cities. By analyzing data from 274 Chinese cities during the period 2009–2012, it is found that air pollution significantly reduces the international inbound tourism: an increase of PM 10 (particulate matter smaller than 10 μ m) by 0.1 mg/m 3 will cause a decline in the tourism receipts-to-local gross domestic product (GDP) ratio by 0.45 percentage points. This study also highlights the importance of controlling for endogeneity, since the detrimental impact of air pollution would otherwise be considerably underestimated. This study further demonstrates that, although air pollution is positively correlated with the average expenditure of each tourist, it substantially depresses the number of inbound tourists. The results imply that air quality could potentially influence inbound tourists’ city destination choices. However, it is interesting to note that travelers in air polluted cities in China tend to spend more money.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Judd ◽  
Bruno Sauce ◽  
Torkel Klingberg

Schooling, socioeconomic status (SES), and genetics all play large roles in intelligence differences. However, it is unclear to what extent their contributions are unique and if they interact. Here we used a multitrait polygenic score for cognition (cog-PGS) with a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design to isolate how months of schooling relate to intelligence in 7,853 children (aged 9-11). We found large, independent effects of schooling, cog-PGS, and SES on working memory, crystallized (cIQ), and fluid intelligence (fIQ). Intriguingly, we found evidence for gene-by-environment interplay between cog-PGS and SES for cIQ, and a trend in the same direction for fIQ. This interaction was negative meaning that the intelligence of the highest SES children was the least affected by genetic differences, while the lowest SES children were most affected by genetic variability. Schooling showed no interaction with cog-PGS or SES for the three intelligence domains tested. While schooling had strong main effects on intelligence, it did not lessen, nor widen the impact of these preexisting SES or genetic factors.


1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Abraham S. Ross ◽  
Beth Lacey

To demonstrate the usefulness of programme evaluation within the university a regression discontinuity design was used to assess the impact of a remedial education programme. Using multiple regression and analysis ofcovariance, credit course grades of students who had been enrolled in the remedial programmes were compared to the credit course grades of non-remedial students. The results indicated that the remedial programmes were not improving performance above what would have been expected based on high school marks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 188 (6) ◽  
pp. 987-990
Author(s):  
Nicole E Basta ◽  
M Elizabeth Halloran

Abstract The regression discontinuity design (RDD), first proposed in the educational psychology literature and popularized in econometrics in the 1960s, has only recently been applied to epidemiologic research. A critical aim of infectious disease epidemiologists and global health researchers is to evaluate disease prevention and control strategies, including the impact of vaccines and vaccination programs. RDDs have very rarely been used in this context. This quasi-experimental approach using observational data is designed to quantify the effect of an intervention when eligibility for the intervention is based on a defined cutoff such as age or grade in school, making it ideally suited to estimating vaccine effects given that many vaccination programs and mass-vaccination campaigns define eligibility in this way. Here, we describe key features of RDDs in general, then specific scenarios, with examples, to illustrate that RDDs are an important tool for advancing our understanding of vaccine effects. We argue that epidemiologic researchers should consider RDDs when evaluating interventions designed to prevent and control diseases. This approach can address a wide range of research questions, especially those for which randomized clinical trials would present major challenges or be infeasible. Finally, we propose specific ways in which RDDs could advance future vaccine research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001312452110045
Author(s):  
Martha Abele Mac Iver ◽  
Kellie Wills ◽  
Anna Cruz ◽  
Douglas J. Mac Iver

This study evaluates a “nudge letter” to parents intervention designed to reduce chronic absenteeism among students in one urban district. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD), it estimates the impact of the intervention on improving student attendance. The forcing variable for the RDD was 2016–2017 attendance rate, with a “threshold” of a 0.90 attendance rate (missing 10% of days). Analyses established demographic equivalence of students in the 0.88 to 0.92 baseline attendance bandwidth. Although the overall impact of the intervention on attendance change between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017 (first-quarter attendance) was small and non-significant (ES 0.09, p = .20), the effect size for middle school students (0.34, p = .044) was “substantively important” by What Works Clearinghouse standards. The effect of the intervention on the full year’s attendance rate was not significant.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document