Researchers Unable To Replicate Findings of Published Economics Studies (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Federal Reserve economists Andrew Chang and Phillip Li looked at 67 papers in 13 reputable academic journals. Their findings were shocking. Without the help of the authors, only a third of the results could be independently replicated. Even with the author's help, only about half, or 49%, could. Business Insider reports: "It's a pretty massive issue for economics, especially given the impact that the subject has on public policy. Li and Chang use a well-known paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff as an example. The study showed a significant growth drop-off once a country's national debts reached 90% of gross domestic product, but three years after being published the study was found to contain a significant Microsoft Excel error that changed the magnitude of the effect." With cancer studies and most recently psychology studies all having replication trouble, these economics papers have some company.

Comments

Re: Why would anyone be shocked?

[silentcoder]

Hell not only do they lack evidence they even use their own custom definition of inflation as "increased money supply". The proper definition is "decreased buying power". Those things do not always correlate. A lot of inflation happens in static currencies as well for example. By their definition it is true that austerity prevents inflation but also utterly meaningless since thats just what they defined the word to mean. However they want you to assume the connotations of the proper definition still apply (it does not). Increased money supply does not have to equal decreased buying power. Especially if it is offset by taxes (which they ignore).
So the claim is nothing but a ruse intended to drive a political ideology. It has absolutely no bearing on useful economic analysis.

As an aside ignoring taxes is stupid because austerity reduces tax revenue and provably it always does so by several orders of magnitude more than it saves in expenses. Austerity can, as baseline mathematics, never ever achieve anythiny except to make the deficit much larger much faster.

Re:You have failure backwards

[The Real Dr John]

Couldn't agree more Roger. Economics is not a field of scientific inquiry. It is far more prone to fudging than biochemistry, or my field, neuroscience. Any scientist can manipulate or cherry pick the data, but in the end it will only hurt their reputation and so most experienced researchers go to great lengths to make sure their experimental results are reproducible. I am notorious in the lab for insisting on more repetition of experiments that have worked well a number of times. Nobody likes doing repetitive and tedious experiments but it is part of the job.

I do however agree that fudging in science may be increasing, but that seems more due to the pressures of scarce funding. If science were funded as well as the military is, there would be no temptation for fudging on anyone's part.