October 1, 2003 was a very productive day ::CoreEcon

People do respond to incentives

Fertile-aged Australian couples showed a tremendous amount of insight into the forecasting of government policy?

Actually, not. Quoting:

But we don’t think there was any (or much) of this. Instead, births themselves were shifted. Something that is much more worrying. We know this because (1) when we look at the types of procedures, it was all in inducements and cesareans. ‘Normal’ deliveries were unaffected; something that would not be the case if books were fiddled; and (2) June was an unusually low month for births and July (as a whole) was an unusually high month. Indeed, one quarter of all births were shifted by more than two weeks!

Via Daniel Drezner.