2 research outputs found
Free Discontinuity Design: With an Application to the Economic Effects of Internet Shutdowns
Thresholds in treatment assignments can produce discontinuities in outcomes,
revealing causal insights. In many contexts, like geographic settings, these
thresholds are unknown and multivariate. We propose a non-parametric method to
estimate the resulting discontinuities by segmenting the regression surface
into smooth and discontinuous parts. This estimator uses a convex relaxation of
the Mumford-Shah functional, for which we establish identification and
convergence. Using our method, we estimate that an internet shutdown in India
resulted in a reduction of economic activity by over 50%, greatly surpassing
previous estimates and shedding new light on the true cost of such shutdowns
for digital economies globally.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures; authors listed alphabetically; code available at
https://github.com/Davidvandijcke/fd