Category: NEWS & EVENTS


Could Bayes Have Saved Us From the Replication Crisis?

[Excerpts are taken from the article “The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis” by Aubrey Clayton, published at nautil.us] “Suppose an otherwise healthy woman in her forties notices a suspicious lump in her breast and goes in for a mammogram….

Read More

Sad News for Happiness Studies

[Excerpts taken from the article “The Sad Truth about Happiness Scales” by Timothy Bond and Kevin Lang, forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy] “A large literature has attempted to establish the determinants of happiness using ordered response data from…

Read More

Replication Failures: The Plot Thickens

[Excerpts taken from the working paper “Replicator Degrees of Freedom Allow Publication of Misleading “Failures to Replicate” by Christopher Bryan, David Yeager, and Joseph O’Brien, posted at SSRN] “…using data from an ongoing debate, we show that commonly-exercised flexibility at…

Read More

Big Changes in Reproducibility Policies by the American Economic Association

[Excerpts taken from an email sent out by the American Economic Association to its members on July 16, 2019] “On July 10, 2019, the Association adopted an updated Data and Code Availability Policy, which can be found at https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/policies/data-code. The…

Read More

Lessons Learned from the Pre-Results Review Pilot at the Journal of Development Economics One Year On

[From the blog “Pre-results Review at the Journal of Development Economics: Lessons learned so far” by Andrew Foster, Dean Karlan, Edward Miguel and Aleksandar Bogdanoski, posted at Development Impact at World Bank Blogs] “In March 2018, the Journal of Development…

Read More

How to Certify Reproducibility for Confidential Data. In France.

[From the article “Certify reproducibility with confidential data” by Christophe Pérignon, Kamel Gadouche, Christophe Hurlin, Roxane Silberman, and Eric Debonnel, published in Science] “Many government data, such as sensitive information on individuals’ taxes, income, employment, or health, are available only…

Read More

Is It Persistence Over Time? Or Over Space?

[From the article “The standard errors of persistence” by Morgan Kelly, published at Vox – CEPR Policy Portal] “Does the slave trade continue to affect trust between people in Africa? Does a country’s prosperity depend on the genetic diversity of…

Read More

Lagged Variables Make Good Instruments…Not!

[From the working paper, “Lagged Variables as Instruments” by Yu Wang and Marc Bellemare, posted at http://www.marcfbellemare.com%5D “…applied econometricians often settle on less-than-ideal IVs in an effort to “exogenize” x … One such less-than-ideal identication strategy is the use of what…

Read More

Twenty Years and Over a Thousand Citations, But It Couldn’t Be Reproduced

[From the commentary “Novelty in science should not come at the cost of reproducibility” by Andrew Holding, published in The FEBS Journal] “Oestrogen receptor (ER) cycling is a dogma of the Oestrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer field.” “For nearly 20…

Read More

To Your List of Biases in Meta-Analyses, Add This One: Accumulation Bias

[From the preprint “Accumulation bias in meta-analysis: the need to consider time in error control” by Judith ter Schure and Peter Grünwald, posted at arXiv.org] “Studies accumulate over time and meta-analyses are mainly retrospective. These two characteristics introduce dependencies between…

Read More