Apparent earlier draft of the paper: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.pdf https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.p

Apparent earlier draft of the paper: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.pdf https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.p... I haven't paid to read the linked article, but the abstracts do differ significantly. Perhaps the work in the above link is presumably not representative of the final published version, which is about 20 pages shorter. That could just be formatting differences, though. About 60% of the pages in the earlier version are figures and tables, many of which get, but do not fill, a dedicated page. The author has presumably had ~5 years to keep working on it in the intervening time. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on various factors including one's own opinion on how the scientific process should work. Personally, I'm always pretty a priori skeptical of this style of economic "natural experiment". I'm rather fond of economist Ronald Coase's observation that, "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess." And 5+ years is a long time to spend p-hacking one set of data. But it's hard to know what all is in a 30-page paper based on just a 150-word abstract. So I would encourage people to be very cautious about getting too caught up in dissecting and discussing this without taking some time to digest the whole thing first. Arguably Hacker News is just not the right venue in the first place because it's set up to reward opinions that people can assemble in a matter of minutes, and digesting and understanding the merits of a 30-page economics paper probably deserves more like a week's worth of time.