Continuous treatment DiD

An Application to abortion clinic closures

Introduction

My substack was started for two reasons: to explain econometric methodologies that I thought readers might enjoy, and to explain new papers at the Journal of Human Resources in a series called #JHR_Threads. This time I thought it might be fun to combine the two by discussing two papers smashed together that I thought might help the reader understand the other. These papers are “Difference-in-differences with a Continuous Treatment” by Brantly Callaway, Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Pedro Sant’Anna, and “How Far is Too Far? New Evidence on Abortion Closures, Access and Abortions” by Jason Lindo, Caitlyn Myers, Andrea Schlosser and myself. The first paper is a decomposition of continuous treatment DiD (hence the name), the latter is a study of the impact of abortion closures on abortion demand using distance (continuous treatment) as the treatment variable, and this substack is mashup of the two. It may feel a little nonlinear at times, but my hope is that it will work as a s…