Episode 11: Why is our number this number?

About this episode

Scott and Caitlin discuss the decomposition of the two-way fixed effects estimator in econometrics.

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-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Me and Caitlin continue to go through this deck that Claude made for us explaining the new Callaway, Goodman-Bacon and Sant’Anna paper, forthcoming at AER, about continuous treatment diff-in-diff. Mainly, though, we are just working our way painstakingly slow through this Frisch-Waugh-Lovell decomposition of the OLS regression to better understand just what OLS is doing. I thought this episode was pretty interesting though your mileage may vary. I mean, if you don’t find two economists trying to help each other understand an econometrics paper, then probably the floor on this episode could be a little low. But that said, I did enjoy it. We both really seemed to help one another…

People in this episode

Host: Scott Cunningham

Guest: Caitlin Myers

Topics covered

• econometrics
• diff-in-diff
• two-way fixed effects
• OLS regression
• continuous treatment
• decomposition

Keywords

• econometrics
• two-way fixed effects
• diff-in-diff
• OLS regression
• continuous treatment
• decomposition
• AER
• Caitlin Myers
• Scott Cunningham

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AER, Scott's Mixtape Substack

Books & works: Callaway, Goodman-Bacon and Sant’Anna paper, Frisch-Waugh-Lovell decomposition, OLS regression

More episodes of The Mixtape with Scott

• Episode 13: Finally the Continuous Diff-in-Diff Estimator Shows Up! · June 9, 2026 · 1h 33m
• Episode 12: What's our causal effect called? · May 26, 2026 · 1h 9m
• Episode 10: Doses and Decompositions! · May 12, 2026 · 1h 40m
• Episode 9: Mystery Solved! · May 5, 2026 · 59 min
• Episode 8: Poisson Regressions (Finally) · April 28, 2026 · 1h 12m
• Episode 7 of the Odd Couple: Human Verification, I mean, Hannah Verification! · April 21, 2026 · 1h 6m