> I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt simply because it’s more plausible that this is a brain fart; if he wanted to commit intentional fraud, he would be INSANE to make his fraud so easily verifiable. No rational economics professor is going to risk his career by submitting a paper to the JPE knowing that 3/4 of data is duplicates, since he would rationally expect it to be caught immediately by the JPE
>since he would rationally expect it to be caught immediately by the JPE
Should he though? He's affiliated with UChicago and very well may have had some idea that code/data would not actually be checked. Further, you don't need to be a tenured economist to know that in cases like this it's in the best interests of both the journal and the author to simply ignore all calls for retraction and do nothing. It would be very embarrassing for all involved and as you correctly note this way nothing happens to anybody.
One reason not to have a retraction is that it's good to give the replication study authors a publication in return for their good work, and it's hard to do that if you retract the original publication. Also, the original study isn't exactly wrong, it sounds like-- it just has 1/4 of the data, so results become statistically insignificant.
It would be nice if the post said what the original paper's conclusions were, and which, if any, survive the fix-up.
Nice work. That there is no retraction coming is absolutely ridiculous. Not surprising, but ridiculous. You would think a massive screw up that invalidated the results would be an obvious retraction, or at least a banner at the top of the article stating "This article has been found to be flawed, and the findings do not hold. Please go to the following paper for discussion."
Well, you would think that if you believed you lived in a world where academic integrity was important to academics. Instead big name journal publications and the pretense that your journal deserves its big name are all that are important.
I am fascinated by these articles regarding fraudulent data in the social sciences. Here is why. A couple years back I was decided I must read papers by a local education professor who was lecturing at our high school. This was way out of my lane! Even so it tool only half an hour to realize her papers were garbage. No data, only anecdotal, uncontrolled observations, no control groups references to other papers that had no data.
Good to see falsification exists in other disciplines
> I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt simply because it’s more plausible that this is a brain fart; if he wanted to commit intentional fraud, he would be INSANE to make his fraud so easily verifiable. No rational economics professor is going to risk his career by submitting a paper to the JPE knowing that 3/4 of data is duplicates, since he would rationally expect it to be caught immediately by the JPE
>since he would rationally expect it to be caught immediately by the JPE
Should he though? He's affiliated with UChicago and very well may have had some idea that code/data would not actually be checked. Further, you don't need to be a tenured economist to know that in cases like this it's in the best interests of both the journal and the author to simply ignore all calls for retraction and do nothing. It would be very embarrassing for all involved and as you correctly note this way nothing happens to anybody.
One reason not to have a retraction is that it's good to give the replication study authors a publication in return for their good work, and it's hard to do that if you retract the original publication. Also, the original study isn't exactly wrong, it sounds like-- it just has 1/4 of the data, so results become statistically insignificant.
It would be nice if the post said what the original paper's conclusions were, and which, if any, survive the fix-up.
By the by, when I opened this article there were 6 comments shown, but when I commented myself none showed up. Did something happen?
Nice work. That there is no retraction coming is absolutely ridiculous. Not surprising, but ridiculous. You would think a massive screw up that invalidated the results would be an obvious retraction, or at least a banner at the top of the article stating "This article has been found to be flawed, and the findings do not hold. Please go to the following paper for discussion."
Well, you would think that if you believed you lived in a world where academic integrity was important to academics. Instead big name journal publications and the pretense that your journal deserves its big name are all that are important.
I am fascinated by these articles regarding fraudulent data in the social sciences. Here is why. A couple years back I was decided I must read papers by a local education professor who was lecturing at our high school. This was way out of my lane! Even so it tool only half an hour to realize her papers were garbage. No data, only anecdotal, uncontrolled observations, no control groups references to other papers that had no data.
Good to see falsification exists in other disciplines
Mm. Surprise surprise. I'm not sure many people have mistaken economics for Science, have they?
😡