Christ, there's a lot of ignorance of academic economics is this thread.
It is not peer reviewed & I don't why it should even be discussed. Forget the good aspects,non-peer reviewed studies are largely considered junk in the academic world!
This is so incredibly wrong it makes my head hurt. Working papers (especially NBER working papers, which this was) are
the most commonly discussed and covered type of economic paper, mostly due to the fact that they tend to be very high quality and publishing in economics takes forever. From the time a paper is done being written to publication can take years in economics; journals take forever even on the most basic desk rejection. Econ working papers are often better than the published versions of the same paper and receive more citations. Further, econ isn't the only field where working papers are the
lingua franca; math and many of the hard sciences use extensive commenting on working papers through arXiv and the like.
Also, can't two different study methodologies (both reasonable in their own right) just produce different results? Below the author of the Berkley study critiques the UW methodology. Though I'm sure both could agree to disagree.
http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-Feldstein.pdf
I think I once remember reading a quote that was something like "You can get an economist to find any conclusion you like". I'm sure there are so many conservative groups out there that could sponsor a study that shows Seattle is doomed.
University academic studies produce conflicting results all the time. It's kind of hard to make clear cut determinations of which one is "right" and which is "wrong".
The UW paper is clearly superior to the Berkeley paper given that UW replicated Berkeley's results and then showed why they painted an incomplete picture of the situation. UW simply had better data than Berkeley; their methodologies were barely any different! Berkeley's hemming and hawing is the academic equivalent of being a sore loser.
