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Presumably they could control for that by looking at the stats for Fridays when no major album releases. And they could probably check what they were listening to at the time as well. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right.
Importantly, this study design permits
adjustment for potential confounding factors that could be related to both album release timing
and traffic fatality risk (e.g., albums tend to be released on Fridays) while still taking advantage
of the otherwise exogenous variation in album release timing.
Presumably they could control for that by looking at the stats for Fridays when no major album releases. And they could probably check what they were listening to at the time as well. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right.
They seem to control for day of week:
Edit: Direct link to full paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34866/w34866.pdf