This paper examines potential tradeoffs between research methods in answering important questions versus providing more cleanly identified estimates on problems that are potentially of lesser interest. The strengths and limitations of experimental and quasi-experimental methods are discussed and...

This article takes a critical look at the literature on equity premium puzzle - the inability of standard intertemporal economic models to rationalize the statistics that have characterized U.S. financial markets over the past century. A summary of historical returns for the United States and...

New Keynesian models and some models of growth rely on market power for their results. This sole focus on market power as the source for certain macroeconomic phenomena is misguided both theoretically and empirically. New Keynesian multipliers are closely related to standard measures of...

This paper investigates the precision of conventional and unconventional estimates of the natural rate of unemployment (the 'NAIRU'). The main finding is that the NAIRU is imprecisely estimated: a typical 95% confidence interval for the NAIRU in 1990 is 5.1% to 7.7%. This imprecision obtains...

Audit correspondence studies are field experiments that test for discriminatory behavior in active markets. Researchers measure discrimination by comparing how responsive individuals ("audited units") are to correspondences from different types of people. This paper elaborates on the tradeoffs...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors in cash welfare and SNAP receipt in three major U.S. household surveys. We find high rates of misreporting, particularly failure to report receipt. The surveys inaccurately capture patterns of multiple program participation, even...

Statistically significant results are more rewarded than insignificant ones, so researchers have the incentive to pursue statistical significance. Such p-hacking reduces the informativeness of hypothesis tests by making significant results much more common than they are supposed to be in the...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented policy responses and a large literature evaluating their impacts. This paper re-examines this literature and investigates the role of researchers' degrees-of-flexibility on the estimated effects of mobility-reducing policies on social-distancing...