Discussion Boards

Consumer Response to Composite Ratings of Nursing Home Quality, Marcelo Perraillon, Tamara Konetzka, Daifeng He, and Rachel Werner, in the American Journal of Health Economics, 2019, right here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1162/ajhe_a_00115 . This article illustrates the bugaboo of regression discontinuity methods: elegant theoretically, they can sometimes yield nonsensical results in practice. This happens in Figure 1, which illustrates the trend lines on each side of a set of discontinuities for relatively small bandwidths. The anticipated slopes of these lines are clear from theory: all positive. In practice, they are all over the place. In this paper, description is saying something, if we stop to listen.

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.