Luis Felipe Gaviria Gil

80% of the book is worthless text, mainly loose comments from the author. The remaining 20% ​​corresponds to the real story. The beginning of the book may seem captivating, but it quickly turns into a rather dark and boring epiphany about whaling. In the end, finishing reading is almost torture.

I bought this book following the suggestion of my advisor that with it I would understand the core and the details of regression discontinuity designs (RDDs), both from statistical foundations and from coding. What I've found, instead, was a rather poor explanation, lacking the necessary and rigurous derivations for each steps of an RDD. In addition, all the examples (and the coding attached to them) were quite simple and basic, and mostly were from other authors. The coding, morevor, was completely outdated. So, even though I bought this book to understand RDDs and have some coding as a reference to guide my own research, I had to look for other sources to get this. I know this book is not intended to serve as text book or academic material. But when you write a specialized book, at least you aim to achieve some level of rigurosity. This book fails to do this.