“Waiting for Life to Arrive”: A history of the regression-discontinuity design in Psychology, Statistics and Economics

This paper reviews the history of the regression discontinuity design in three academic disciplines. It describes the designʹs birth and subsequent demise in Psychology even though most problems with it had been solved there. It further describes the scant interest shown in the design by scholars formally trained in Statistics, and the designʹs poor reception in Economics from 1972 until about 1995, when its profile and acceptance changed. Reasons are given for this checkered history that is characterized as waiting for life to arrive.