Frank Diebold, on Mostly Harmless Econometrics:
All told, Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion is neither "mostly harmless" nor an "empiricist's companion." Rather, it's a companion for a highly-specialized group of applied non-structural micro-econometricians hoping to estimate causal effects using non-experimental data and largely-static, linear, regression-based methods. It's a novel treatment of that sub-sub-sub-area of applied econometrics, but pretending to be anything more is most definitely harmful, particularly to students, who have no way to recognize the charade as a charade.Disclaimer, I haven't read the book. The quote does summarize feelings I have had in many seminars involving difference in difference in difference regressions with 100 fixed effects and controls. But mostly I post it as a lovely quote.
