2024 ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting: August, 2024
Free Discontinuity Regression: With an Application to the Economic Effects of Internet Shutdowns
Florian Gunsilius
Discontinuities in regression functions can reveal important insights. In many contexts, like geographic settings, such discontinuities are multivariate and unknown a priori. We propose a non-parametric regression method that also estimates the location and size of discontinuities by segmenting the regression surface. In contrast to thresholding approaches, which are well-known to misclassify discontinuities in settings with noise, we prove identification of and convergence to the true location and size of the discontinuities for the proposed method. We use the estimator to show that an internet shutdown in India resulted in a reduction of economic activity by 25--35\%, greatly surpassing previous estimates and shedding new light on the true cost of such shutdowns for digital economies globally.
Preview
Slides
