Course: Transparent and Open Social Science Research

Here, I’d like to dive a little deeper into Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke’s article “The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design is Taking the Con out …

If you’ve ever taken a science class, there’s a good chance you’ve read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. The book is a widely considered a modern classic …

Interest in data sharing, while growing, has yet to become a scientific norm. This may be due, in part, to a common belief that the cost of preparing and making …

Nowadays, many policies are being put into place that require research to be accessible to anyone through public archives. Political Scientist Allan Dafoe, author of “Science Deserves Better: The Imperative …

Though Sol Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and I found remarkable convergence in findings from studies of climate change’s impact on human conflict, agreement was not universal. In “One effect to rule …

“Replication is a central tenet of science; its purpose is to confirm the accuracy of empirical findings, clarify the conditions under which an effect can be observed, and estimate the …

Replicability and replication are very important to the process of ensuring the validity of scientific findings. Pure replications can verify that a past analysis was done correctly and statistical replications …

This article is a good example of when a pre-analysis plan was useful. Katherine Casey, Rachel Glennerster, and I exploited the random assignment and participation of communities in a governance …

In the last video, Professor Miguel discussed two articles arguing for and against the use of pre-analysis plans. If you have time, they are both worth reading. In the first …

Registries were developed to address the “file drawer problem” and encourage more complete reporting of results. But because they are a relatively recent platform – the American Economics Association (AEA) …

In this article, authors Annie Franco, Neil Malhotra, and Gabor Simonovits leverage Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS) to find evidence of publication bias and identify when it occurs …

In this article, authors Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn propose a way to distinguish between truly significant findings and false positives resulting from selective reporting and specification searching, …

Social scientists have begun promoting the adoption of higher standards of transparency in order to improve both the quality and credibility of research. With a predominating “dysfunctional reward structure” that …

In his essay “A Note on Science and Technology in a Democratic Order,” Robert Merton delineates four overarching norms of a scientific ethos: Universalism, Communality, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism. He …

In this article, economists David Card and Alan Krueger analyze the effect of an increase in the minimum wage on unemployment using aggregated time-series studies. They estimate the probability of …