Reinhart, Rogoff, and Austerity

[It'sNotAFakeID]

So the numbers themselves are public information you can find from various sources. But their spreadsheet where they tabulated the data and performed the calculations, that was not released. The UMass guy, Herndon, was able to look up the information publicly but couldn't reproduce the results and couldn't figure out why.

 

I feel, peer reviewed journal or not, those spreadsheets and other stuff like this, ought to be released if you're going to publish your research. Otherwise we're taking it on faith that you didn't do something stupid like mistype one of several hundred numbers, or I don't know, forget to sum up a few rows.

 

Something from which even Harvard economists are not, apparently, immune.

 

I'll tackle this through my lens as a social science researcher. Often the data that gets published is the results, not the data where the results came from. Publishing the actual data runs the risk of losing the confidentiality of the participants, which is unethical. This doesn't really apply to this study but perhaps there needs to be talks of exceptions to the rules.

 

Regardless, it is up to other researchers to reproduce the results. Good on the kid for finding the error. Shame on the two for being so desperate to find a result that they performed bad science.