Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

By Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the ...

Yuliy Sannikov: Winner of the 2016 Clark Medal

By Susan Athey and Andrzej Skrzypacz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

Yuliy Sannikov is an extraordinary theorist who has developed methods that offer new insights in analyzing problems that had seemed well-studied and familiar: for example, decisions that might bring about cooperation and/or defection in a repeated-play pr...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2017

Foreword

By Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, May 2017

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Kelly Markel

American Economic Review, May 2017

The Economist as Plumber

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2017

As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possi...

Assessing the Rate of Replication in Economics

By James Berry, Lucas C. Coffman, Douglas Hanley, Rania Gihleb, and Alistair J. Wilson

American Economic Review, May 2017

We assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 American Economic Review. Across 70 empirical papers, we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the original result. While only a minority of papers has a p...

Replications in Development Economics

By Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Review, May 2017

I examine replications of empirical papers in development economics published in the top-5 and next-5 general interest journals between the years 2000 through 2015. Of the 1,138 empirical papers, 71 papers (6.2 percent) were replicated in another publishe...

Replication in Labor Economics: Evidence from Data, and What It Suggests

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, May 2017

Examining the most heavily cited publications in labor economics from the early 1990s, I show that few of over 3,000 articles, citing them directly, replicates them. They are replicated more frequently using data from other time periods and economies, so ...

A Proposal to Organize and Promote Replications

By Lucas C. Coffman, Muriel Niederle, and Alistair J. Wilson

American Economic Review, May 2017

We make a two-pronged proposal to (i) strengthen the incentives for replication work and (ii) better organize and draw attention to the replications that are conducted. First we propose that top journals publish short "replication reports." These reports ...

What Is Meant by "Replication" and Why Does It Encounter Resistance in Economics?

By Maren Duvendack, Richard Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates a...

Replication and Economics Journal Policies

By Jan H. Höffler

American Economic Review, May 2017

Economics journals with reproducibility policies are cited more often than others. For the minority of journals with a mandatory and enforced policy, this is significant when controlling for time and journal effects. To cope with the large variety of soft...

Replication, Meta-analysis, and Research Synthesis in Economics

By Richard G. Anderson and Areerat Kichkha

American Economic Review, May 2017

Replicability is essential to assure the scientific integrity of empirical economic research. Some authors have suggested metadata analysis as a complementary tool. This suggestion must be addressed with caution. Empirical studies in most of economics are...

A Preanalysis Plan to Replicate Sixty Economics Research Papers That Worked Half of the Time

By Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li

American Economic Review, May 2017

We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that ...

Groupy versus Non-Groupy Social Preferences: Personality, Region, and Political Party

By Rachel E. Kranton and Seth G. Sanders

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper replicates results that some people, when allocating income, are "groupy" and discriminate between in and out groups, but many show no such bias. The paper explores psychometric, demographic, and political correlates. In an M-Turk experiment, n...

Altruistic Capital

By Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera

American Economic Review, May 2017

To understand altruistic behavior, we must understand the process through which altruism develops and is shaped by the agents' own choices and exogenous factors. We introduce the concept of altruistic capital, which grows with effort devoted to altruistic...

Economic Development and the Regulation of Morally Contentious Activities

By Julio J. Elías, Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis, and Paola Salardi

American Economic Review, May 2017

The regulation of many activities depends on whether societies consider them morally controversial or "repugnant." Not only have regulation and related ethical concerns changed over time, but there is also heterogeneity across countries at a given time. W...

Challenges in Constructing a Survey-Based Well-Being Index

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Kristen B. Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball

American Economic Review, May 2017

How should a survey-based measure of well-being be implemented? How could it be constructed in a systematic and politically neutral way? These questions should be approached by economists with the same level of care that has been taken in the theoretical ...

Repugnance Management and Transactions in the Body

By Kieran Healy and Kimberly D. Krawiec

American Economic Review, May 2017

Researchers have made progress in understanding the role of repugnance in transactions involving the human body. Yet, often, the focus remains on exchange between individuals and how they mentally cope (or not) with repugnance. But these exchanges also en...