He compared the probability of being reported for having committed a serious crime in Italy, before and after legalization, across males who applied shortly before and shortly after the cutoff. This method allows for an almost pristine regression discontinuity design—allowing Pinotti to identify the aforementioned causal effect of legal status on the number of crimes committed by immigrants in the destination country. As learned in class, the regression discontinuity method elicits the causal effects of interventions by assigning a cutoff or threshold above or below which an intervention is assigned. The unique characteristic in which regression discontinuity differs from other pre-post group designs is the method by which people in the study are assigned. In these types of designs, people are assigned to comparison groups solely on the idea of a cutoff score on a pre-program
He compared the probability of being reported for having committed a serious crime in Italy, before and after legalization, across males who applied shortly before and shortly after the cutoff. This method allows for an almost pristine regression discontinuity design—allowing Pinotti to identify the aforementioned causal effect of legal status on the number of crimes committed by immigrants in the destination country. As learned in class, the regression discontinuity method elicits the causal effects of interventions by assigning a cutoff or threshold above or below which an intervention is assigned. The unique characteristic in which regression discontinuity differs from other pre-post group designs is the method by which people in the study are assigned. In these types of designs, people are assigned to comparison groups solely on the idea of a cutoff score on a pre-program