If the concept of a podcast where two economists use Claude Code to do research together sounds absurd, well, you would not be wrong. But that has not stopped Caitlin Myers and I from doing it. This podcast is about the two of us using Claude Code to do a research project together on abortion clinic closures and the effect it had on marriage using a Texas natural experiment called House Bill 2, and county level marriage data we collected with Claude in an earlier episode. Some of you had asked to see the “beautiful deck” that Claude made for us last week and so here it is!

And here is the YouTube video if you’re wanting to watch us and meet Hannah.

The age of AI has shifted things somewhat for researchers where we have to bring in verification of what we do sooner and often. Figuring out how, when and where to do that is something me and Caitlin, as well as most listeners, are trying to figure out too. Caitlin had the idea of embodying our own verification methods with a real live human being — a former student of hers, Hannah Sayre, a recent graduate of Middlebury College. In this episode, we meet Hannah, talk with her and hear about her own story and journey as a young person aspiring to a PhD in economics, and how what her job will be on this project to confirm what we are doing with Claude Code.

Plus a little easter egg if you skip ahead is in the video because Caitlin is going to tell us about her new job!

Thanks again for your listener and viewer support! This podcast, just like the substack, is a labor of love. So sit back and enjoy!

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott season 5, "The Odd Couple" Scott Cunningham (Professor of Economics at Baylor) and Catilin Myers (Professor of Economics at Middlebury College) set out to use Claude Code to get the data for their project studying travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic's effect on marriages in Texas after House Bill 2 shut down half the state's clinics. As they do, they talk about their project, the trappings of having a third party robot as a colleague and RA on this project done on the air, and articulate aloud the prompts as they do them!

Thanks again for all your support! This substack and the podcast are labors of love. Please consider becoming a subscriber at only $5/month!

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.