It is common in regression discontinuity analysis to control for high order (third, fourth, or higher) polynomials of the forcing variable. We argue that estimators for causal effects based on such methods can be misleading, and we recommend researchers do not use them, and instead use...

Various noninformative prior distributions have been suggested for scale parameters in hierarchical models. We construct a new folded-noncentral- t family of conditionally conjugate priors for hierarchical standard deviation parameters, and then consider noninformative and weakly informative...