Conclusion: the standard for evidence in economics is much lower than the standard of evidence in medicine or sociology.
They started from a typical armchair hypothesis and then looked for a way to interpret data to fit that hypothesis. That by itself is not remarkable, but the quality of the interpretation is questionable at best and outright malicious as worst.
>The authors first use data from the American Time Use Survey to confirm the link between precipitation and television watching. The results suggest a strong relationship - a child under age 3 watches an average of 27 additional minutes of television on a day with one inch of precipitation (which is equivalent to a day of heavy rain) than on a day with no precipitation.