The present fiscal di fficulties of many countries amplify the call for structural reforms. To provide stylized facts on how reforms worked in the past, we quantitatively review 60 studies estimating the relation between reforms and growth. These studies examine structural reforms carried out in...

Standard economics models require that financial incentives improve performance, while leading theories in psychology allow for the opposite. Experimental results are mixed, and so far have not been corrected for publication bias and model uncertainty. We collect 1,568 economics estimates...

We demonstrate that all meta-analyses of partial correlations are biased, and yet hundreds of meta-analyses of partial correlation coefficients (PCC) are conducted each year widely across economics, business, education, psychology, and medical research. To address these biases, we offer a new...

Class size reduction mandates are frequent and invariably justified by studies reporting positive effects on student achievement. Yet other studies report no effects, and the literature as a whole awaits correction for potential publication bias. Moreover, if identification drives results...

We conduct a meta-analysis of 1,973 estimates of stock price responses to shareholder activism reported in 67 primary studies. We document publication bias in the literature. Corrected activism effects range from 0% to 1.5%. Effects are stronger when shareholder rights are better protected and...

This paper provides concise, nontechnical, step-by-step guidelines on how to conduct a modern meta-analysis, especially in social sciences. We treat publication bias, p-hacking, and heterogeneity as phenomena meta-analysts must always confront. To this end, we provide concrete methodological...

Conventional meta-analyses of correlations are biased due to the correlation between the estimated correlation and its standard error. Simulations that are closely calibrated to match actual research conditions widely seen across correlational studies in psychology corroborate these biases and...

Over the past several decades, meta-analysis has emerged as a widely accepted tool to understand economics research. Meta-analyses often challenge the established conventional wisdom of their respective fields. We systematically review a wide range of influential meta-analyses in economics and...

Common wisdom suggests that beauty helps in the labor market. We show that two factors combine to explain away the mean beauty premium reported in the literature. First, correcting for publication bias reduces the premium by at least a third. Second, controlling for cognitive ability negates the...

We examine the factors influencing published estimates of hedge fund performance. Using a sample of 1,019 intercept terms from regressions of hedge fund returns on risk factors (the alphas) collected from 74 studies, we document a strong downward trend in the reported alphas. The trend persists...