economics – Retraction Watch

Editors of economics journal resign after association renews Taylor & Francis contract

Forty-one editors, associate editors and advisory board members resigned from their roles at the Review of Social Economy after the Association for Social Economics, which owns the journal, renewed its contract with publisher Taylor & Francis.

The resigning members, who cited concerns the publisher would eventually transition the journal to a model based wholly on author publishing fees as a reason for their departure, say they plan to launch their own publication. ASE, however, denies the journal plans to fully rely on author publishing charges.

The four coeditors of the journal resigned on July 4, according to an email to the ASE we have seen. Former editor Roberto Veneziani, economics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said that happened two days after the association decided to renew its contract with Taylor & Francis. On July 10, 37 associate editors and advisory board members also resigned, noting they shared the values of the coeditors.

Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him

On May 9, a university administrator in Afghanistan threatened in a LinkedIn post to expose what he called a publishing scam by private universities in India.

“These institutions contact academicians globally, promising payment for publishing research papers that will boost their national and international rankings,” Mohd Asif Shah, dean of the faculty of economics at Kardan University in Kabul, alleged.

The following day, Shah elaborated in a new post: “Four years ago, Woxsen University asked me to publish papers and file patents under their affiliation. I agreed, delivered, and they proudly displayed those publications on their website. Now, after four years, they are denying payment for that work.” He also complained his “patent incentives were being unilaterally reduced” from 40,000 Indian rupees (US$420) to 17,500 rupees (US$184) per patent — “a reduction of over 56%.”

Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

Elsevier has pulled a dozen papers by a finance professor in Ireland who oversaw the review of the articles and made “the final decision” to publish them in three journals he edited, according to the retraction notices.

The professor, Brian M. Lucey of Trinity College Dublin, and his coauthors disagreed with the retractions, which came a few days before Christmas.

“I’m not disputing the fact that I made the final decision” to publish the articles, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations, Lucey told us in an interview. ”What I’m disputing is that that is not prima facie grounds” for retracting them.

Journal pulls paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

An Elsevier journal last week retracted a paper by two senior economists who used questionable methods to replace large chunks of missing observations in their dataset without disclosing the procedure.

The move follows a Retraction Watch story published in February that revealed the paper’s corresponding author, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University in Sweden, used Excel’s autofill function and other undisclosed operations to populate thousands of empty cells, or well over 10% of the dataset.

In a guest post on our blog, economist Gary Smith argued Heshmati and his coauthor had “no justification” for not describing what they had done. Smith also commented in an article for Mind Matters that “the solution to an absence of data is not to fabricate data.”

Less than three weeks after our report, Elsevier told us it would pull the study, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries,” which appeared last year in the Journal of Cleaner Production. On May 4, the publisher issued a retraction notice stating:

Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.

Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.

As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”

Heshmati and his coauthor, Mike Tsionas, a professor of economics at Lancaster University in the UK who died recently, made no mention of missing data or how they dealt with them in their 2023 article, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” Instead, the paper gave the impression of a complete dataset. One economist argued in a guest post on our site that there was “no justification” for such lack of disclosure.

How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study

Nearly 100 years ago, Muriel Bristol refused to drink a cup of tea that had been prepared by her colleague, the great British statistician Ronald Fisher, because Fisher had poured milk into the cup first and tea second, rather than tea first and milk second. Fisher didn’t believe she could tell the difference, so he tested her with eight cups of tea, half milk first and half tea first. When she got all eight correct, Fisher calculated the probability a random guesser would do so as well – which works out to 1.4%. He soon recognized that the results of agricultural experiments could be gauged in the same way – by the probability that random variation would generate the observed outcomes.

If this probability (the P-value) is sufficiently low, the results might be deemed statistically significant. How low? Fisher recommended we use a 5% cutoff and “ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level.”

His 5% solution soon became the norm. Not wanting their hard work to be ignored entirely, many researchers strive mightily to get their P-values below 0.05.

Econ journal board quits en masse because Wiley ‘appeared to emphasize quantity over quality’

In what has become a familiar refrain, more than 30 editors and advisors of an economics journal have resigned because they felt the publisher’s need for growth would increase the “risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.”

In a letter uploaded to Dropbox on February 7, the editors and advisors of the Journal of Economic Surveys said: “We no longer believed that the corporate policies and practices of the Journal’s publisher, Wiley, as we perceived them through several statements made by Wiley and the draft of a new editor agreement submitted to the attention of Editors-in-Chief and Managing Editors by Wiley, were coherent with ours.”

Despite involving a lawyer, the now-former editors said:

No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper

Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.

The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.

“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)

Ex-cops tangle with journals over strip clubs and sex crimes

A study by two economists who found opening strip clubs or escort services caused sex crimes in the neighborhood to drop contains “fatal errors” and should be retracted, argues a group of past and current law enforcement officers, including three academics.

“None of us are prudes or even anti-strip club,” Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore police officer, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter). “But if you claim strip clubs reduce sex crimes – and by 13 percent! – you’re delving into serious policy issues.”

He added: “This is very typical of academics getting out of their field. They have second-hand data. They crunch the numbers … They don’t know what the data mean.”

Econ study retracted after researchers find ‘undocumented alterations in the code’

An economics study has been retracted after other researchers identified several inconsistencies in the study’s code and submitted a comment to the journal.

Those critics say the flaws drove the paper’s main findings, but an author of the study says they had no major effect and stands by the results.

The original paper, “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital,” was published in the American Economic Review in September 2022. It examined the impact of a 2013 increase in the tax rate on dividends in France, concluding an increased rate can encourage the accumulation of capital. The study has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction is only the second in the journal’s history. As Retraction Watch has previously reported, research shows that it is less common for economics papers to be retracted than research in other fields.

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