After 16 episodes of working with Claude Code to study the effect of abortion clinic closures on marriage rates using a natural experiment, so to speak, in Texas called "House Bill 2" and continuous difference-in-differences with a treatment of "change in distance", Caitlin and I start our descent. Caitlin shares her own thoughts about returning a poisson estimator, and we continue to wrestle with the implications of differences in econometric estimators and interpretation, as well as what we are willing to live with. Plus a lot of discussion about the implications of AI for our lives as researchers manages to creep in its pretty little head!

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Caitlin Myers and myself have been studying the effect of House Bill 2 in Texas, which closed half the state's abortion clinics, on marriage rates using "continuous difference-in-differences" estimation for 14 episodes straight.

But behind every good diff-in-diff estimate lurks a parallel trends assumption, and so we asked Hannah to look into one confounder -- oil! fracking! energy! Perhaps things related to technologies that enhanced the extraction of oil from the ground, like fracking technology, could have alone shifted marriage rates by bringing men into communities but only for work, temporary residence, not permanence.

We talk about a literature where men in transit can alone reshape the marriage markets, which if those events happened disproportionately in our treatment counties, but also our control counties, then parallel trends mechanically *might* be violated. Because remember -- parallel trends is a) about things differentially impacting the treatment and control units on *outcome trends* and b) therefore can impact the treatment group *or* the control group. Hannah comes back with research she did for us on it.

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This week is a hoot! Caitlin and I finally get some estimates of the different target parameters using continuous treatment diff-in-diff! We discuss in detail how the estimator works and then go through our analysis. Watch to the end to see our reaction when we finally see some output in a beautiful deck!

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.