FEATURED ARTICLE | APRIL 2, 2018 Economists Should Be More Careful With Their Statistics
By Robert P. Murphy I n recent years, researchers in the social sciences have realized that they face a "replication crisis." As major results in experimental psychology fall apart under further scrutiny, economists might have taken comfort in the relative rigor of their own field. However, economists, too, have often been careless in their research design and have been overconfident in the strength of their published results. In a recent episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts interviewed Stanford University's John Ioannidis to discuss his 2017 publication "The Power of Bias in Economics Research." Ioannidis and his co-authors found that the vast majority of estimates of economic parameters were from studies that were "underpowered," and this, in turn, meant that the published estimates of the magnitude of the effects were often biased upward. Unfortunately, many economists (including me) have little training in the concept of "statistical ...