The Mixtape with Scott

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...

Caitlin and I are back after a one week hiatus as we each ran around traveling in our respective parts of the world. Probably for the best, as it allowed two weeks of twoway fixed effects decompositions to marinate. But now it’s time — can we finally see what a continuous treatment difference-in-differences estimator actually is for goodness sake? And the answer is sort of! In this episode, me and...

In one sense, causal inference has two approaches. You can run a regression and then backwards engineer what it means. Think of Imbens and Angrist's 1994 classic Econometrica on the local average treatment effect (LATE) where they show that the Wald estimator (binary treatment, binary instrument) is the average effect for the complier subpopulation. But the other way that causal inference often ru...

Welcome to the 11th episode of The Mixtape with Scott, season 5, “The Odd Couple” featuring Caitlin Myers! This week we continue the riveting material from last week where we walked through a decomposition of the twoway fixed effects estimator when it’s 2 period, diff-in-diff with a continuous treatment! Yes, you heard me right — be still my beating heart. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supp...

Today will astonish and amaze because in this one, you will watch me explain the decomposition of the OLS twoway fixed effects estimator for the continuous treatment difference-in-differences! A first for podcast history I would be willing to bet! Thanks again for turning in! (Caitlin said she thought this turned out well, but your mileage may vary). Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported...

This week's episode of "The Odd Couple" is just Caitlin and Hannah as I had to go to Georgetown to talk about Claude Code at a faculty retreat. But before we get going with a description, Hannah mentioned at the start during the ice breaker about the opening theme song to the podcast, and for those that don't recognize the lyrics, that's Mac Miller's "Small Worlds" sung by my two nephews. So what...

This week, Caitlin and Scott and Claude debate what a regression is, and then run some poisson regressions of county level marriages in Texas onto travel distance to the nearest county with an abortion provider! If that doesn’t get your heart beating fast, you should go to the doctor because you may be dead! This is a fun episode and hope you like it! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported...

As I’ve said on here, and others have said repeatedly, the bottleneck in research is probably less so production as it is verification now that researchers have access to AI Agents like Claude Code, Gemini and Codex. But how to verify, and what to verify, is largely something all researchers will have to bumble through themselves. We did it the old fashioned way — we asked Hannah to check Claude’s...

In this episode of the Mixtape with Scott, and season 5's "The Odd Couple", featuring Caitlin Myers and myself (Scott Cunningham), we work with Claude Code to make beautiful figures of our identification strategy -- the change in travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic caused by House Bill 2 closing half of Texas's abortion clinics. We are slowly beginning to prepare for our diff-in-diff st...

Me and Caitlin Myers are back with our trusted robot command line interface secret agent with a license to kill, Claude Code! This week we continue our live research project studying the closure of abortion clinics across Texas under House Bill 2 and its effect on county marriage certificates, or the flow of new marriages. In the previous weeks, recall Claude Code helped find, pull, store locally...

If the concept of a podcast where two economists use Claude Code to do research together sounds absurd, well, you would not be wrong. But that has not stopped Caitlin Myers and I from doing it. This podcast is about the two of us using Claude Code to do a research project together on abortion clinic closures and the effect it had on marriage using a Texas natural experiment called House Bill 2, an...

This podcast is part of my long running podcast called “The Mixtape with Scott”, which had historically been an oral history of economics through in-depth interviews with living economists. After around 130 interviews over four seasons, I’m taking a break to talk about Claude Code with my good friend and coauthor, Caitlin Myers ! What we do on the podcast is we are doing a research project togethe...

In this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott season 5, "The Odd Couple" Scott Cunningham (Professor of Economics at Baylor) and Catilin Myers (Professor of Economics at Middlebury College) set out to use Claude Code to get the data for their project studying travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic's effect on marriages in Texas after House Bill 2 shut down half the state's clinics. As t...

The Odd Couple The Mixtape with Scott is back. Season 5. Season 5 of the Mixtape with Scott is going to be different, and fun, and different, and creative! It’ll be called The Odd Couple. And it’ll be called “The Mixtape with Scott (Featuring Caitlin Myers)”. It’ll have different naming conventions until Caitlin pick one we like! Let me tell you all about it. I started the podcast around four year...

Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott . I’m currently in the process of putting together a new slate of interviews, and while it’s not quite ready yet, I didn’t want to leave you hanging. So in the meantime, I’m re-sharing some conversations from earlier seasons — episodes that I think are worth revisiting or perhaps discovering for the first time. Today’s rerun is from Season Two, and it’s one o...

Greetings from Cambridge! I’m still mid-move and not fully settled—classes kick off next week and I’m wrapping the last bits of admin—so I’m sharing one more rerun before we close out Season 4. Today’s guest is a Cambridge neighbor just down the Charles at MIT: Dr. Amy Finkelstein , John Bates Clark Award–winning economist. If you’re new to her work: Amy is a leading health economist at MIT and co...

Greetings everyone. I’m still in moving mode, packing up life in Texas and getting ready for a year in Boston. I hit the road on Friday of this week for a three day road trip and am still behind on everything. That means the podcast is still on reruns for now, but I should have a new episode for you next time. This week’s rerun is one I really liked, though—my conversation from two years ago with...

I’m still going through some older reruns for the summer due to my travel schedule. This one is an interview with Rocío Titiunik , a quantitative methods political scientist and professor in the department of politics at Princeton University, as well as a researcher that has been at the frontier of work on regression discontinuity designs. Her name is synonymous with cutting-edge work on regressio...

Greetings from San Sebastián Spain where I am on holiday with my daughter for another couple of weeks. I have still not done any new podcasts as I realized only after I left that I did not pack my microphone. And, I didn’t want to buy a new one, and I wasn’t really 100% positive if using my Apple AirPods would work well. All of that is to say — excuses . So, this week we are going back down memory...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott — an interview-based podcast where I, Scott Cunningham, talk to living economists about their personal lives. I continue my travels in Europe without a good microphone, which has caused me to delay my newest interviews a little bit longer. Therefore this week’s episode is an oldie but a goodie — Jon Roth, a young econometrician at Brown University . Jon has had ma...

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is a rerun of an earlier interview I did with Muhammad Akbarpour , an economic theorist at Stanford University. Muhammad tells his life story of growing up in Tehan, Iran and his long and windy road into economics and Stanford University, where he both went to grad school and is now an assistant professor. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to it or...

Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott , a podcast about the lives and stories of living economists. This show often unfolds in themed mini-series, and lately I’ve been exploring one that I’ve been curious about for a while: the economists who navigated and participated in the heterodox tradition in economics. Today’s guest is Amitava Krishna Dutt , a development economist, now emeritus at the Uni...

Welcome to this week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott. Today’s podcast guest is our 127th guest on the show— Vitor Possebom, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Fundação Getulio Vargas. Vitor’s research sits at the intersection of two areas — econometrics and causal inference, and policy evaluation in Latin America, particularly Brazil. His contributions revolve around ref...

Welcome to The Mixtape with Scott , a podcast dedicated to exploring the personal stories of living economists. I'm your host, Scott Cunningham , Professor of Economics at Baylor University. Today, I'm delighted to introduce Jessica Brown, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina . Jessica is also a Research Fellow at IZA and a Facu...

Welcome to this week's episode of The Mixed Tape with Scott. I'm your host, Scott Cunningham. This podcast is devoted to the personal stories of living economists, diving into their lives, careers, and the fascinating paths they've walked. This week's guest is Michael Anderson, an economist from the University of California Berkeley's Department of Agricultural Resource Economics . Michael earned...