This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...

This paper considers testing the hypothesis that errors in a panel data model are weakly Cross-sectionally dependent (CD), using the exponent of cross-sectional dependence introduced recently in Bailey, Kapetanios and Pesaran (2012). It is shown that the implicit null of the CD test depends on...

Economists sometimes interpret the failure of a significance test to disconfirm a hypothesis as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six examples of this are cited from recent journals. But this is a misinterpretation of what significance tests show. While in general it is correct that every...

In a recent paper Juodis and Reese (2021) (JR) show that the application of the CD test proposed by Pesaran (2004) to residuals from panels with latent factors results in over-rejection and propose a randomized test statistic to correct for over-rejection, and add a screening component to...

Decisions on the presence of seasonal unit roots in economic time series are commonly taken on the basis of statistical hypothesis tests. Some of these tests have absence of unit roots as the null hypothesis, while others use unit roots as their null. Following a suggestion by Hylleberg (1995)...