[From the blog “Why We Cannot Trust the Published Empirical Record in Economics and How to Make Things Better” by Sylvain Chabé-Ferret, posted at the blogsite An Economist’s Journey]

“A strain of recent results is casting doubt on the soundness of the published empirical results in economics. Economics is now undergoing a replication crisis similar to the one psychology and cancer research have undergone in the last ten years. This crisis is so broad that it concerns all of the published empirical results and it is so severe that it might mean that most of them are wrong. The mere fact that we cannot trust any of them and do not know which ones hold and which ones do not casts doubt on all of the empirical results in our field. This is very serious business.”

“In this blog post, I want to briefly explain what the replication crisis in economics is and what are its most likely causes. I’ll then provide some evidence along with personal stories and anecdotes that illustrate the bad behaviors that generate the replication crisis. Then, I’m going to detail the set of solutions that I think we need in order to overcome the crisis. Finally, I will end with a teaser about a project that I am preparing with some colleagues, the Social Science Knowledge Accumulation Initiative, or SKY (yeah, I pronounce SSKAI SKY, can I do that?), that we hope is going to provide the infrastructure necessary in order to implement the required changes.”

To read more, click here.