Why Economics Is Having a Replication Crisis
Recreating research by gathering data from the real world and analyzing it statistically often fails to produce the same result.
Lab rats can’t help.
Photographer: BSIP/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
By now, most people have heard of the replication crisis in psychology. When researchers try to recreate the experiments that led to published findings, only slightly more than half of the results tend to turn out the same as before. Biology and medicine are probably riddled with similar issues.
But what about economics? Experimental econ is akin to psychology, and has similar issues. But most of the economics research you read about doesn’t involve experiments — it’s empirical, meaning it relies on gathering data from the real world and analyzing it statistically. Statistical calculations suggest that there are probably a lot of unreliable empirical results getting published and publicized. Those results in turn drive policy.