Some Stylized Facts About Econometrics Citations Patterns, Diff-in-Diff Citation Patterns and Software Downloads

Or, "How I couldn't go to sleep and stayed up to 2am doing fake research and rejected all my theories about something no one else but me probably cares about"

It likely goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway as maybe some of the readers don’t know this. But since 2018, a series of econometrics papers on difference-in-differences have absolutely exploded in popularity in economics. What started as a revision to practice has — separate that alone — become a peculiar citation phenomenon unlike anything I h…