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by poormathskills 1800 days ago
I agree that it seems to be a pretty poor paper.

>They even acknowledge that the correlation could be due to a factor that isn't being accounted for.

Related to this, they're performing a regression between Airbnb prevalence and crime, but they only control for a single variable: income[0]. They look at others in a robustness check, but a single control variable practically screams p-hacking.

They also don't address the fact that both Airbnb prevalence and crime are nonstationary[1]. Regressing two nonstationary time series results in a nonsense coefficient[2]. Two totally unrelated time series will have a high coefficient if both exhibit consistent trends.

[0] "We report the results based on using income as the main tract-level control variable"

[1] They are consistent trends over time, see https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/07/stationary....

[2] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/94723/using-non-st...