Municipal demolition orders posted on vacant buildings are intended to compel owners to act, yet their effects on neighbouring parcel owners remain poorly specified. the present analysis treats the posting threshold as a spatial discontinuity and evaluates whether a before-after-control-impact design can credibly recover the causal effect of crossing that threshold on adjacent investment. Because no observational data are available, the study characterises the operating characteristics of the design under a declared variance structure: between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5, and an intraclass correlation of 0.64. Power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points.54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power, a requirement that exceeds the largest cluster count examined. Minimum detectable effects remain above 5 percentage points for all cluster counts considered. The contribution is a design-based framework that specifies the conditions under which spatial regression discontinuity can identify demolition-order spillovers, and it establishes that the posting threshold is a credible estimand only when cluster coverage is substantially expanded beyond current municipal data systems.
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Cheruiyot et al. (2026) studied this question.
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