Ah, more amateur data analysts running a few time series regressions and thinking they're doing economics. Check out the big warning at the bottom of the moreus

Ah, more amateur data analysts running a few time series regressions and thinking they're doing economics. Check out the big warning at the bottom of the moreuseful.com post with a very forthcoming "We have not established causality!" The entire crux of Diamond, McQuade and Qian is that there was a pseudorandom assignment of rent control benefits to certain tenants but not others in the 1994 law. They use this variation to identify their models. This gives them a defensible causal story: here are two similar groups, with and without rent control, we'll study how their behavior differs. You can see all this starting in section 4 of their paper.