Regression Discontinuity and Event Studies in Time Series

Check out the new paper, "Regression Discontinuity in Time [RDiT]: Considerations for Empirical Applications", by Catherine Hausman and David S. Rapson.  (NBER Working Paper No. 23602, July 2017.  Ungated copy here.)

It's interesting in part because it documents and contributes to the largely cross-section regression discontinuity design literature's awakening to time series. But the elephant in the room is the large time-series "event study" (ES) literature, mentioned but not emphasized by Hausman and Rapson.  [In a one-sentence nutshell, here's how an ES works: model the pre-event period, use the fitted pre-event model to predict the post-event period, and ascribe any systematic forecast error to the causal impact of the event.]  ES's trace to the classic Fama et al. (1969).  Among many others, MacKinlay's 1997 overview is still fresh, and Gürkaynak and Wright (2013) provide additional perspective.

One question is what the RDiT approach adds to the ES approach, and related, what it adds to well-developed time-series toolkit of other methods for assessing structural change. At present, and notwithstanding the Hausman-Rapson paper, my view is "little or nothing".  Indeed in most respects it would seem that a RDiT study *is* an ES, and conversely.  So call it what you will, "ES" or "RDiT". 

But there are important open issues in ES / RDiT, and Hausman-Rapson correctly emphasize one of them, namely issues and difficulties associated with "wide" pre- and post-event windows, which is often the relevant case in time series.

Things are generally "easy" in cross sections, where we can usually take narrow windows (e.g., in the classic scholarship exam example, we use only test scores very close to the scholarship threshold).  Things are similarly "easy" in time series *IF* we can take similarly narrow windows (e.g., high-frequency asset return data facilitate taking narrow pre- and post-event windows in financial applications).  In such cases it's comparatively easy to credibly ascribe a post-event break to the causal impact of the event.

But in other time-series areas like macro and environmental, we might want (or need) to use wide pre- and post-event windows.  Then the trick becomes modeling the pre- and post-event periods successfully enough so that we can credibly assert that any structural change is due exclusively to the event -- very challenging, but not hopeless.

Hats off to Hausman and Rapson for beginning to bridge the ES and regression discontinuity literatures, and for implicitly helping to push the ES literature forward.