Graduating economics PhDs face intense competition when seeking faculty or research positions at universities and research institutions. We examine the relationship between statistically significant results, arguably used as indicators of research quality in a competitive academic market, and...

Goni (2022) relies on a novel data on peerage marriages in Britain to examine the impact of matching technology on marital sorting. He relies on the London Season interruption (1861-1863) as a natural experiment that raised search costs and reduced market segregation. In his preferred...

Mahmood and Jetter (2023) rely on daily wind conditions as an exogenous source of variation to assess the effects of 420 US drone strikes conducted in Pakistan from 2006 to 2016. The findings indicate that these drone strikes promote a subsequent surge in terrorism over the following days and...

Williams (2022) ties the political participation of Blacks to historical lynchings that occurred in the United States. Her findings document lower Black voter registration rates in southern counties with greater number of historical lynchings. We show that this effect is driven by four outlier...

Hassan et al. (2024) describe a randomized controlled trial conducted in Bangladesh during COVID-19. This comment identifies data irregularities from the original paper's replication package and notes its connection to other published papers. Critically, Hassan et al. (2024) andWang et al....

Wang et al. (2024) report that Bangladeshi students randomly given access to lessons on a phone server saw significant learning gains during COVID- 19 school closures. We identify three sets of anomalies. First, this experiment shares participants with another experiment conducted simultaneously...

How efficiently do scientific results make their way into the wider world? Applying multiple methods to the universe of hypothesis tests reported in three leading health journals between 2016 and 2022 we evidence the important role of statistical significance as a driver of popular attention to...

Transparent communication of robustness is essential in empirical research, yet existing tools can be difficult to interpret. This paper introduces the robustness dashboard, a graphical tool that visualizes the results of robustness reproductions into a single, intuitive graph. The robustness...

Vlassopoulos et al. (2024) find that after providing two hours of telephone counseling over three months, a sample of Bangladeshi women saw significant reductions in stress and depression after ten months. We find three anomalies. First, estimates are almost entirely driven by reverse-scored...