@arindube.bsky.social is your guy

That's a fair point. I certainly understand the concern and it's something we'll keep in mind when updating the paper. Generally, I use questions in titles to indicate that the paper comes from a place of genuine uncertainty about the result, but I appreciate your point.

Worth noting that we always have the same number of clusters, the N is just a matter of whether the data is long or wide

I meant to “Apoorva and I” haha. Back to the good old days without an edit button.

There are so many potential estimators in this setting, and @apoorvalal.com found it super interesting to unpack them together. The table you're pointing has five pretty different estimators. Synth (col 2) doesn't regularize so it overfits and the ses blow up. We should dig into the big se from ebal

I feel like a grumpy old guy when I explain what it was like to run areg and wait for an evening back in the days before reghdfe

There's more in the paper validating the design and exploring why Democratic counties were more likely to apply.

We welcome your comments!

bit.ly/lal_thompson...

We benchmark the size of these effects against the margin in the 2020 presidential election in a number of ways. While every benchmarking exercise has flaws, these exercises suggest that the grants did not swing the election from Trump to Biden.

After selecting weights that put counties that did not apply for the grants on the same trajectory as recipients before 2020, we find that the grants did not substantially increase turnout or Democratic vote share in 2020. (We're using synthetic diff-in-diff weights.)

Even though Democrats applied for and received the funding at much higher rates, we find that the grants did not noticeably advantage Democrats in the 2020 election.

Using administrative data on which counties applied for and received the grants, we document that counties that supported Clinton in 2016 were substantially more likely to apply for and receive a grant.

The CTCL's grantmaking process was neutral---every eligible local election office that applied received a grant. But critics point out that Democratic counties were much more likely to apply, potentially advantaging Democratic candidates.

The largest private election administration grant program in 2020 (~$350M) was run by the Center for Tech and Civic Life and funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. This funding has been highly controversial with 24 states banning future grants.

thank you Jim Snyder for your hilarious but simple hack for making tex tables

I feel like I'm being subtweeted