Applied Micro People: Stop Everything and Read this Now

This new Athey-Imbens paper has it all! Intuitive descriptions of the most fashionable identification strategies, plus examples, plus practical suggestions for best practices. The paper does excellent job of describing the strategies we know well (RD, difs-in-difs), but then also describes newer variations of these strategies (RKD, synthetic controls, nonlinear difs-in-difs) that we might not yet have used. My favorite section is the one on supplementary analyses! I have used many of these techniques in my papers, but I have never thought about doing them in any systematic way. There is also a section on machine learning.  I'm not at all familiar with these techniques, but if Athey and Imbens put this section in here, I should probably learn it!

This paper is a must-read for all applied micro students as well as anyone teaching any applied micro class at the graduate level. Actually, all applied micro people should have a look every now and then. Even if you don't use these techniques in your own research, knowing the "state of applied microeconomics" will make you better referees, better seminar/conference participants, better human beings? Ok, maybe not necessarily better human beings...well, maybe.  :)