Search Results
Working Paper
An Interview with Neil Wallace
A few years ago we sat down with Neil Wallace and had two lengthy, free-ranging conversations about his career and, generally speaking, his views on economics. What follows is a distillation of these conversations.
Journal Article
A Journal Ranking Based on Central Bank Citations
We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014-2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specializing in macro, monetary, and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals are represented reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare ...
Working Paper
RePEc, a Tool and Open Dataset for and about Economists
RePEc is an initiative created by economists for economists in 1997. It functions primarily as a bibliographic tool, but it also collects various linked metadata about economists, their institutions, and their impact. Thus, a labor economist may be interested in RePEc beyond literature searches and tracking—namely, as a dataset describing a profession, its members, and their output. This essay describes RePEc’s origins and history, the many facets of its data and how the data can be accessed. It also provides some examples of scholarly studies leveraging RePEc data that could be of ...
Working Paper
Paving the Road for Replications: Experimental Results from an Online Research Bibliography
Are users of a bibliographic database interested in learning about replications? Can they be induced to learn? To answer these questions, we performed an experiment at the online research bibliography, RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). RePEc is the main research bibliography for pre-prints and published papers in economics. Using randomized stratification, we allocated 324 replications and their corresponding original studies to clusters. We then drew from those clusters to construct treatment and control groups. Brightly colored tabs were added to the relevant webpages to alert visitors ...
Working Paper
Paving the Road for Replications: Experimental Results from an Online Research Repository
Are users of a bibliographic database interested in learning about replications? Can we motivate them to learn? To answer these questions, we performed an experiment on a RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) website: Using randomized stratification, we allocated 324 replications and their corresponding original studies to clusters; we then drew from those clusters to select treatment and control groups. We added brightly colored tabs to the relevant webpages to alert visitors to the existence of a replication study or to the original study of a replication. We monitored traffic over three ...
Working Paper
A journal ranking based on central bank citations
We present a ranking of journals geared towards measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014–2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specialising in macro, monetary and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals feature reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare somewhat less ...
Working Paper
A journal ranking based on central bank citations
We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications, such as their working paper series. Whereas this ranking confirms the policy relevance of the major general interest journals in the field of economics, the major finance journals fare less favourably. Journals specialising in monetary economics, international economics and financial intermediation feature highly, but surprisingly not those specialising in econometrics. The ranking is topped by the Brookings ...
Report
Star Wars at Central Banks
We investigate the credibility of central bank research by searching for traces of researcher bias, which is a tendency to use undisclosed analytical procedures that raise measured levels of statistical significance (stars) in artificial ways. To conduct our search, we compile a new dataset and borrow 2 bias-detection methods from the literature: the p-curve and z-curve. The results are mixed. The p-curve shows no traces of researcher bias but has a high propensity to produce false negatives. The z-curve shows some traces of researcher bias but requires strong assumptions. We examine those ...
Report
Comment on "Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back"
Using a novel meta-analytical method, Brodeur et al. (2016) argue that hypothesis tests in top economic journals have exaggerated levels of statistical significance. Brodeur et al. (2020) apply the same method to another sample of hypothesis tests, obtaining similar results. We investigate the reliability of the method by highlighting questionable assumptions and compiling a dataset to examine their merits. Our findings support the original conclusions.