Discussion Boards

The Effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Marriage, Matt Hampton and Otto Lenhart, in Economic Inquiry, 2022, right here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecin.13052 . This article builds on a theme developed in Food for Thought question #2 in Chapter 8, concerning experimental content in a geographic context. Though the article doesn't explicitly address the issue of experimental content, the concerns it implies are (probably) adequately addressed through the use of by-now standard econometric procedures. Nonetheless, there still is room for improvement, so it is useful to compare the estimation strategies used in this paper to those advocated in the book.

The Impact of Nurse Turnover on Quality of Care and Mortality in Nursing Homes, Yaa Antwi and John Bowblis, in the American Journal of Health Economics, 2018, right here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1162/ajhe_a_00096 This uncomplicated article involves three types of regressions: a basic pooled model, one adding fixed effects, and another adding instruments. The issue involves closing the loop. The direction of possible bias is clear, and addition of fixed effects (which is expected to reduce bias) moves the coefficient estimate accordingly, but the use of IV moves the estimate very far in the other, unexpected direction. This unexpected result is unexplained. In addition, the issue of experimental content arises, not in the main regression, but in the first-stage regression using the instrument, reinforcing the point made in article #5, that issues with experimental content can take many forms and arise in a variety of circumstances, even those designed to produce "good" estimates that can be given causal interpretations.

Supply-Side Responses to Public Quality Ratings, Ian McCarthy and Michael Darden, in the American Journal of Health Economics, 2017, right here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1162/AJHE_a_00070 This article addresses an issue that I have looked at myself on the demand side (here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hec.968 ). Confusion about the experimental unit leads to problems with experimental content. The first clues show up in the tables (in N) and a key figure. This article demonstrates that using the research designs that are most popular these days does not let you abnegate concerns about craftsmanship!