I am very pleased to announce that Sebastian Calonico, Matias Cattaneo and Rocio Titiunik are the winners of the Society for Political Methodology’s 2015 Gosnell Award. This award is for the best work in political methodology presented at any political science conference during the preceding year. The winning paper is "Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs”. Please join me in congratulating the authors on this prestigious honor. 

The citation from the award committee (Jake Bowers (chair), Adam Glynn, and Xun Pang) is the following:

Sebastian Calonico, Matias Cattaneo and Rocio Titiunik's "Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs" advances political methodology with a new approach to estimating causal effects in regression discontinuity (RD) designs. Noting that confidence intervals for the local-linear polynomial estimated average treatment effect at the threshold tend to be invalid (and overly liberal) because of biases arising from common bandwidth selection procedures, Calonic, Cattaneo and Titiunik propose a bias-corrected estimator that not only improves performance asymptotically but also in small-samples (such as those common in small windows around the discontinuities which drive the RD design). The authors also propose an automatic bandwidth selection procedure that produces valid confidence intervals in wide variety of RD design settings. The creativity of the statistical theory combined with the practicality of the fast to compute and closed-form results has led this paper to change the analysis of RD designs even before it was published in Econometrica after presentation at the Political Methodology Summer Meeting of 2014.


Please join me in thanking the award committee as well as the many individuals who submitted nominations for this award. 



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Kevin Quinn
Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
490 Simon #7200
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-7200
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President 
The Society for Political Methodology
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