Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a very widely-used tool in business and economics research, but how trustworthy are results from well-published studies that use it? Analyzing the universe of hypotheses tested on the platform and published in leading journals between 2010 and 2020 we find evidence of...

[Introduction:] This is a replication of Mayshar et al. (2022) (henceforth MMP).1 The article posits that the state (defined as societal hierarchy such as tax-levying elites) originated from cultivation of appropriable cereal grains, contrary to the conventional theory that the state originated...

Pre-registration is regarded as an important contributor to research credibility. We investigate this by analyzing the pattern of test statistics from the universe of randomized controlled trials (RCT) studies published in 15 leading economics journals. We draw two conclusions: (a)...

Restrictions preventing regulators from setting standards on a firm by firm basis are commonly assumed to be inefficient. Existing rationales for their prevalence have been politico-economic. We provide an efficiency interpretation. We characterise settings in which the requirement that firms be...

Minimum standards set by a ‘World Environmental Organisation’ (WEO) and NGO labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection. We explore the potential inter-play between these two approaches when the WEO is subject to pressure from producers. We find...