Category: economics

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:

Continue reading Journal pulls 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.

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

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.

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

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.)

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

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.”

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

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. 

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

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, a new book by Pomona College economics professor Gary Smith. The Washington Post said the book’s lessons “are very much needed.”

The fact that changes in bitcoin prices are driven by fear, greed, and manipulation has not stopped people from trying to crack their secret. Empirical models of bitcoin prices are a wonderful example of data torturing because bitcoins have no intrinsic value and, so, cannot be explained credibly by economic data. 

Undaunted by this reality, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper reported the mind-boggling efforts made by Yale University economics professor Aleh Tsyvinski and a graduate student, Yukun Liu, to find empirical patterns in bitcoin prices. 

Continue reading Torturing data to predict bitcoin prices: A book excerpt

A highly cited economics paper that suggested people raised during recessions were more likely to vote for left-leaning political parties has been retracted, apparently due to a coding error that rendered the results invalid. 

The retraction marks a rarity among economics papers, which research has shown are infrequently retracted compared to papers on other subjects. The article appears to be the first in The Review of Economic Studies to have been retracted for a reason other than publisher error.

The study’s authors, Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, are economists at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the International Monetary Fund, respectively. Giuliano is also the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at UCLA.  

The paper, “Growing up in a Recession,” was published in November 2013. It has been cited 222 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Working papers from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have also cited the article. 

Continue reading Influential paper linking recessions and left-wing voting patterns retracted