The Odd Couple Season 5 Episode 3: What's up with this data?

This podcast is part of my long running podcast called “The Mixtape with Scott”, which had historically been an oral history of economics through in-depth interviews with living economists. After around 130 interviews over four seasons, I’m taking a break to talk about Claude Code with my good friend and coauthor, Caitlin Myers! What we do on the podcast is we are doing a research project together, from start to finish, on abortion and marriage. Specifically, we are studying the effect that of a natural experiment called House Bill 2 that required abortion facilities’ clinicians and physicians to have admitting privileges at hospitals. This led to half the state’s clinics to close causing an increase in travel distance to the nearest abortion facility to rise. Several papers have been written about the effect this had, including one by us, but in this podcast we tackle a question that had not been studied yet — the effect it had on new marriages and new divorces.

But where did we get the data for this? Claude Code found it for us. While I knew of the data, we put Claude Code on the task of finding it — which it did. Claude Code found the data for us on its own, downloaded it for us, stored it in our local directory for us, and then did a benchmark analysis for us of that data against other published data sources on Texas marriages. And then Claude Code made a beautiful deck of slides walking us through what it found and what it all meant for us in our project! For the deck alone, I encourage you to follow along.

What a world we are living in!

Hopefully you find it interesting to see how the sausage gets made — how research projects start, how Caitlin thinks about doing research at all, how slow and meticulous she is about it, and how much fun research can be, as well as how we bring Claude Code into the research process itself. Thanks again for all your support! This has turned out to be a fun.

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