Episode 13: Finally the Continuous Diff-in-Diff Estimator Shows Up!

About this episode

Scott and Caitlin discuss the continuous treatment difference-in-differences estimator in the context of their research on House Bill 2 and its impact on abortion clinic accessibility in Texas.

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 Caitlin wrap up a walk through of what parameters we are identifying with our abortion-marriage paper. I was really puzzled to be honest in the last episode as to what a “dose” even meant in our context. As you may recall, we are studying the effect of House Bill 2 which caused half of Texas’s abortion clinics to close, and in turn made the distance to the nearest abortion clinic to rise. But that led us to wonder: 1. Are we studying the effect of distance to the nearest clinic after House Bill 2, or 2. Are we studying the effect of the change in distance to the nearest clinic after House Bill 2? So, have fun as you listen to us talk through it out and finally realize at the end that it would appear our dose must be one of those and cannot be the other due to the nature of the design…

People in this episode

Host: Scott Cunningham

Guest: Caitlin

Topics covered

• continuous treatment
• difference-in-differences
• abortion clinics
• fixed effects
• distance analysis

Keywords

• continuous treatment
• difference-in-differences
• abortion
• House Bill 2
• Texas
• fixed effects
• distance to clinic
• splines
• kernels

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: House Bill 2

Places: Texas

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• Episode 8: Poisson Regressions (Finally) · April 28, 2026 · 1h 12m
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