I have a confession to make: I haven't had a chance to fully read this week's excellent-looking paper from Attila Ambrus, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez. But! A quick skim convinced me that it's cool enough that it's absolutely worth mentioning. This paper invokes several of my favorite things:
1) Regression discontinuity design - I'm up to my ears in an RD paper with a classmate, and I'm coming more and more to appreciate the benefits of this design. Yes, only having a LATE around a certain threshold can be frustrating from an external validity perspective - but the gains in terms of identification seem to strongly outweigh the costs in many cases.
2) John Snow's 19th century medical work! I'm a little bit of a data visualization nerd, and John Snow's original map of London's cholera outbreak, which helped provide convincing evidence that the Broad Street water pump was contaminated and was the source of the contagion is a classic. Beautiful figure, and incredibly clever.
3) A surprising result. This paper finds that the areas that were negatively affected by the cholera-bearing pump in the 19th century still have lower house prices today. Not what I would've expected.
All in all, this seems like a really cool paper that I wish I had more time to actually dig into at the moment. I'll leave you with the authors' abstract:
What's my current excuse for not reading as much as I should?
Wedding in t-minus 13 (12?) days!
PS: You know you love that pun in the title. You might not admit it out loud, but you do.