By addressing important causation challenges, identical twins provide unique research design opportunities. A well-designed study exploiting identical twins facilitates the need to control for unobservables--including as an important subset, genetic endowments--in analyses that explore the impact of one variable on outcomes of interest. An article in today's NYT (here) describes NASA's current effort to increase understanding of the effects of living in space by studying identical twin astronauts, one of whom will soon return from a full year aboard the International Space Station.
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