Replication in Economics

I was pleased to receive an email today, alerting me to the "Replication in Economics" wiki at the University of Göttingen:

"My name is Jan H. Höffler, I have been working on a replication project funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking during the last two years and found your blog that I find very interesting. I like very much that you link to data and code related to what you write about. I thought you might be interested in the following:   We developed a wiki website that serves as a database of empirical studies, the availability of replication material for them and of replication studies: http://replication.uni-goettingen.de
It can help for research as well as for teaching replication to students. We taught seminars at several faculties internationally - also in Canada, at UofT - for which the information of this database was used. In the starting phase the focus was on some leading journals in economics, and we now cover more than 1800 empirical studies and 142 replications. Replication results can be published as replication working papers of the University of Göttingen's Center for Statistics.
Teaching and providing access to information will raise awareness for the need for replications, provide a basis for research about the reasons why replications so often fail and how this can be changed, and educate future generations of economists about how to make research replicable.
I would be very grateful if you could take a look at our website, give us feedback, register and vote which studies should be replicated – votes are anonymous. If you could also help us to spread the message about this project, this would be most appreciated."

I'm more than happy to spread the word, Jan. I've requested an account, and I'll definitely be getting involved with your project. This look like a great venture!

© 2014, David E. Giles

More on the History of Econometrics

Olav Bjerkholt, of the University of Oslo, emailed me to follow up on my May Reading List post. He commented:

"I noted that you have posted a paper by me on your May list. I recently posted it as a SSRN paper with two others which also might interest you. They are "Trygve Haavelmo at the Cowles Commission", and "Lawrence Klein 1920-2013: Notes on the Early Years"."

Thanks Olav - these papers most certainly do interest me, and I'm sure they'll be of considerable interest to readers of this blog, too.

© 2014, David E. Giles