NB: An earlier version of this post critiqued Victor Chernozhukov’s approach to directed a-cyclic graphs and fixed effects, but made some critical errors in interpreting his approach. These errors were entirely mine, and I apologize to Victor for doing so.
While perusing the news, I read eagerly about the CDC’s recent study examining associations between county-level mask mandates and COVID-19 growth rates. This study has already been the subject of angry retorts from the restaurant industry due to the CDC’s claim that restaurant closures reduced COVID-19 spread.
We’ve all been in that seminar where the author puts up a slide containing regression coefficients, and buried in the bottom line of the table we can see little Ys and Ns indicating the kind of panel data model employed.