Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back

Brodeur, Abel; Lé, Mathias; Sangnier, Marc; Zylberberg, Yanos

doi:10.1257/app.20150044

Cited by 261 publications

(350 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The contribution of this paper is to rigorously study "what economic importance means" and "how to measure it." It complements recent works on how to raise standards and increase transparency in applied economics (see e.g., Brodeur et al (2016); Franco et al (2014) on p-value hacking and publication bias; Maniadis et al (2017) or Camerer et al (2016) on replicability; Pritchett and Sandefur (2015) or Vivalt (2015) on external validity; Oster (2019) or Altonji et al (2005) on the impact of unobservables; Miguel et al (2014) on experimentation in social sciences; Olken (2015) on pre-analysis plans).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Beyond the Stars

Sterck

2019

Journal of Economic Surveys

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It is frequent to hear in economic seminars or read in academic papers that an effect is economically significant or economically important. Yet, the economic literature is vague on what economic importance means and how it should be measured. In this paper, I show that existing measures of economic importance are flawed and misused. I derive a new metric that measures, in percentage terms, the contribution of each explanatory variable to deviations in the dependent variable, ceteris paribus. As an illustration, the method is applied to study the determinants of migration and the determinants of fertility.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Beyond the Stars

Sterck

2019

Journal of Economic Surveys

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“…For instance, Card and Krueger (1995) show that the t-statistics of studies assessing the effect of the minimum wage on employment also gravitate around 2.00. By a similar but more sophisticated analysis Brodeur et al (2016) show that t-statistics reported in articles published in top economic journals are characterized by an atypical distribution, irrespective of the research area. Fanelli (2010) document that such biases are pervasive among most empirical sciences such as medicine, biology, sociology, or psychology.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Political Budget Cycles: Manipulation by Leaders Versus Manipulation by Researchers? Evidence From a Meta‐regression Analysis

Mandon¹,

Cazals²

2018

Journal of Economic Surveys

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Despite a long history of research on political budget cycles, their existence and magnitude are still in question. By conducting a systematic analysis of the existing literature, we intend to clarify the debate. Based on data collected from 1037 regressions in 46 studies, our meta‐analysis suggests that little, if any, systematic evidence can be found in the research record that national leaders do manipulate fiscal tools in order to be reelected. However, it is much more clear that researchers selectively report that national leaders do manipulate fiscal tools in order to be reelected. The publication selection bias highlighted has nonetheless been reduced during the past 25 years of research. We also show that the incumbents' strategies differ depending on which tools they use. Finally, the nature and quality of political institutions appear to be the factors which most affect the political budget cycles.

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“…Consequently, DEL's result might be plagued by such bias, as both the dependent and the explanatory variables are measured with errors, as further discussed below. Alternatively, DEL's finding might also be a result of " p-hacking" 8 (e.g., Simmons et al, 2011;Brooder et al, 2016), because DEL only report results from one measure of preferences for redistribution, even though there are other survey items measuring the same construct. 9 Anyway, to rule out these types of problems in DEL's analysis, it is important to test whether these alternative measures of preferences confirm DEL's result or not.…”

Section: Reliability and Validity Of The Measure Of Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the Relationship between Ethnic Diversity and Preferences for Redistribution: Comment

Nekby¹,

Pettersson‐Lidbom

2017

Scandinavian J Economics

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In this paper, we revisit the question raised in Dahlberg et al. (, Journal of Political Economy 120, 41–76) concerning a causal relationship between ethnic diversity and preferences for redistribution. We find that their results are based on (i) an unreliable and potentially invalid measure of preferences for redistribution, (ii) an endogenously selected sample, and (iii) a mismeasurement of the refugee placement program. Correcting for any of these three problems reveals that there is no evidence of any relationship between ethnic diversity and preferences for redistribution. We also discuss what is currently known about the refugee placement program, and to what extent it can be used for estimating causal effects more generally.

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Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back

Abstract: jected tests. Our interpretation is that researchers might be tempted to inflate the value of those just-rejected tests by choosing a "significant" specification. We propose a method to measure this residual and describe how it varies by article and author characteristics.

Cited by 261 publications

References 37 publications

Beyond the Stars

Beyond the Stars

Political Budget Cycles: Manipulation by Leaders Versus Manipulation by Researchers? Evidence From a Meta‐regression Analysis

Revisiting the Relationship between Ethnic Diversity and Preferences for Redistribution: Comment

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