Replication data for: Geographic Boundaries as Regression Discontinuities

Data to illustrate our geographic RD methodological framework. Illustration is a a re-examination of the effects of political advertisements on voter turnout during a presidential campaign, exploiting the exogenous variation in the volume of presidential ads that is created by media market boundaries. We rely on two data sources. Our main source is the New Jersey voter file. This dataset has measures of party registration, gender and age directly from the voter file, and imputed values of education, income, poverty status, and employment status. The voter file also contains the address of each voter, which allows us to find each voter's geographic location and avoid the use of naive distances. Our second data source is property sales records. We acquired records for all houses sold in the appropriate zip codes in New Jersey from January 2006 to November 2008. In this time period, nearly 3,000 homes were sold in this area -- although we only used the 1,800 house sales inside one specific school district, see below. The housing sales data allow us to conduct a fine-grained analysis of the sales price differential along the boundary of interest.