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A new economics paper is making the rounds this week, and it has some pretty damning conclusions for the state of the whole subject.
Federal Reserve economists Andrew Chang and Phillip Li set about researching how many of the results published in top economics journals could be replicated — repeating the study and finding the same results.
They looked at 67 papers in 13 reputable academic journals.
The result is shocking: Without the help of the authors, only a third of the results could be independently replicated by the researchers. Even with their help, only about half, or 49%, could.
That leads the researchers to a pretty blunt conclusion: "Because we are able to replicate less than half of the papers in our sample even with help from the authors, we assert that economics research is usually not replicable."
They're not using ancient stuff, either. The papers were all published from 2008 to 2013.
Astonishingly, 49% is actually quite a high rate compared with those of similar studies. One investigation in 2006 looked at more than 100 articles in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and found that only 8% could be replicated.
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