Post <blockquote>I agree it looks *very* fishy that they did not cite an extremely closely related paper. This certainly made the contribution look bigger than it actually is. But the the real issue is why this got in the AER, even with the authors' (intentional or unintentional) misguiding about the novelty of their work. Suppose the earlier paper had not existed. Even then there is clearly a large existing literature on this already and the authors have nothing to offer in terms of new data, identification strategy etc. They only look at some other variables. So this is field journal material at best. It is neither original nor creative nor particularly interesting to the broader economics community (really a very narrow health topic). This is consistent with the impression I have of these authors' work more generally. Many people I know where quite surprised Persson got into Stanford (Rossin-Slater seems more appropriately placed).</blockquote>

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