Donor's Deferral and Return Behavior: Partial Identification from a Regression Discontinuity Design with Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how donor deferral and return behaviors are affected by manipulation in regression discontinuity designs, providing a method to obtain bounds on effects when manipulation invalidates standard RD assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel procedure for partial identification bounds in RD settings with manipulation, applicable across various contexts.

Findings

Deferring donors reduces future volunteerism.

Manipulation of reported hemoglobin levels invalidates standard RD.

The proposed method provides bounds despite manipulation.

Abstract

Volunteer labor can temporarily yield lower benefits to charities than its costs. In such instances, organizations may wish to defer volunteer donations to a later date. Exploiting a discontinuity in blood donations' eligibility criteria, we show that deferring donors reduces their future volunteerism. In our setting, medical staff manipulates donors' reported hemoglobin levels over a threshold to facilitate donation. Such manipulation invalidates standard regression discontinuity design. To circumvent this issue, we propose a procedure for obtaining partial identification bounds where manipulation is present. Our procedure is applicable in various regression discontinuity settings where the running variable is manipulated.