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Josh Brake's avatar

Another great article, David. Your curiosity and excitement comes through even in the written transcript of the interview. And thanks Bapu for encouraging me to be more curious about what natural experiments are hiding in plain sight.

Love the creativity. Another book to add to my ever growing reading list, but there are worse problems to have.

The random experiment framing makes me curious what it would be like to integrate this type of thinking into one of my courses. Effectively asking students to be attentive to what is around them and then leverage some mathematical skills and reasoning to try to pull an insight out that might be otherwise ignored.

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Francis Boscoe's avatar

Another 'natural experiment' that I feel has been under-analyzed is Medicare. At age 65, everyone has good health insurance. At age 64, some people have poor health insurance, others have none. Rates of elective procedures like knee replacements spike at age 65, as you get those who have been putting it off. But non-elective procedures go up, too, suggesting people find ways to put just about everything off. If you look at mortality, it's worse to be 65 than 64, because the mortality rate always goes up with age. However, it goes up by less than 64 vs 63 or 66 vs 65. In other words, 64 year-olds die a bit more than they should, all else being equal. (Caveat: I looked into these things about 10-12 years ago and I no longer believe I have access to the data that would allow me to revisit it. Hopefully the Affordable Care Act would have attenuated this effect somewhat, but I know people in my daily life who have, for example, $10,000 annual deductibles and thus try to 'bundle' two or three procedures in the same year to save some money, so it has not gone away).

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