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May 19Liked by scott cunningham

Amazing information

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This is amazing post that I’ll need to read more than once! Thank you!

I have a very minor nitpick. MySpace was probably more important than you make it sound:

“After the acquisition, MySpace continued its exponential growth. In January 2006, the site was signing up 200,000 new users a day. A year later, it was registering 320,000 users a day, and had overtaken Yahoo! to become the most visited website in the United States. ComScore said that a key driver of the site's success in the US was high "engagement levels", with the average MySpace user viewing over 660 pages a month.”

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IIUC, diff in diff assumes parallel trends, meaning that mental health trends in “thefacebook” colleges would have been parallel to trends in non-“thefacebook” colleges if it had not been for “thefacebook” arrival.

To support this assumption, you write “All of them show flat pre-trends, a common heuristic to support parallel trends in Y(0) post treatment.”

However that’s not sufficient to prove parallel trends. That’s where you would have liked more falsifications.

Do I understand correctly?

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