Maren Duvendack

[This blog originally appeared at the blogsite Development Impact] About a year ago, I blogged on a paper that had tried to replicate results on 61 papers in economics and found that in 51% of the cases, they couldn’t get the same result. In the meantime, someone brought to my attention a paper that takes a wider sample and also makes us think about what “replication” is, so I thought it would be worth looking at those results.

Economists aspire to adopt practices of the natural sciences where replication is seen as a crucial and necessary activity. In the natural sciences results are seldom given much credibility unless they have been replicated. Replication contributes in a crucial way to quality. So it is rather strange that replication has traditionally not been seen as a rewarding activity among economists.