Sometimes, authors have data that they are allowed to share, but not openly/without restrictions. This post describes one solution: a restricted, but sharea...
A recent replication package came with a throw-away description in the README of one minor part of the processing: a Python notebook running in about 12 ho...
If you use Github as an deposit for your scientific output, or you are re-using somebody else’s Github deposit, please be precise. I have some thoughts…
A recent replication came to a halt on a first-stage regression. The authors’ code ran fine on the authors’ computer. It failed on ours. Same code, same data...
In economics, it is not uncommon to have data that are so private that the provider cannot be named. Firms (because usually these are firms) may be unwilling...
I had previously described a very similar scenario in a blog post about the PSID, but I thought it would be useful to write a more general post about what to...
For authors preparing the replication packages that accompany their 2026 AEA Papers and Proceedings publication www.aeaweb.org/journals/pandp: Here are some ...
We see this far too often: When we go to check the deposit that authors submit to us, all the files are there, but somewhere halfway through the process, the...
I sometimes see researchers doing much copy-pasting between output from Stata/R/MATLAB and Excel, to create tables. This is a lot of work, the source of many...
The AEA Data and Code Availability Policy asks that authors provide access to all data used in a published paper. But it also acknowledges that there are cas...
We often see researchers handle variants of their analysis by copying and pasting code, or by copying code files into separate directories, and making only m...
Many researchers are confused by the difference between “use” and “(re-)distribution” of data. In a nutshell, just because you are able to freely use the dat...
In the AMAs (see past and future AMAs), we talked about many things. No transcript, but here’s a raw dump of the various websites that were used.
The annual American Economic Journal (AEJ) Best Paper Awards highlight the best paper published in each of the American Economic Journals: Applied Economics,...
I have been asked a few times about guidance for replication packages that use confidential data in research data centers, e.g., the Federal Statistical Res...
I was recently forwarded a question from a data librarian discussion list, and invited to respond to the question of “example language” for a data access des...
Toni Whited (EIC of Journal of Financial Economics) had the following question on the ex-bird site: Econ and finance journals are getting their acts toge...
THIS HAS BEEN RESOLVED. Please deposit as usual! The AEA uses the openICPSR repository for the deposit and dissemination of replication packages. On Sun...
I have previously posted about how to update a replication package, after initial publication. We do get more than a dozen such updates a year (see my annual...
I wanted to briefly discuss the challenges when conducting data provenance and reproducibility checks, for complex and highly interesting articles, with the ...
After our recent discussion about the oldest AEA replication package, I navigated over to the really old archive at the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Surp...
We were recently discussing among data editors what the oldest replication package (in Econ and Political Science) might be.
On 2022-12-15, various data editors, including myself, launched the Data and Code Availability Standard (DCAS). In this post, I will do a self-assessment o...
The data editors of the journals of the American Economic Association1, of the Royal Economic Society2, the Review of Economic Studies, the Canadian Journa...
The template README required by various econ journals asks for a statement about the rights to RE-distribute data. Many economists are confused by this: “But...
The AEA Data and Code Availability does not just require that authors publish a replication package - it also encourages authors to improve upon the replicat...
Back in the fall, I made a few notes regarding how to prepare replication packages when data are confidential (here). What I did not address, and what comes ...
In reproducibility verification, a common scenario is the author response “but-it-works-on-my-machine”. Finding common environments is important in such situ...
On a tangent: we get this question regularly - how to prepare replication packages for papers that used confidential data (here: by statistical agencies). A ...
I wanted to highlight a particular interesting article in the latest AEJ: Microeconomics from the perspective of replicability and reproducibility.
A short thread on software, code, versioning, citation, and repositories. Only very few AEA articles reference Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket repositories. More sho...
A short thread (PSA) on a FOC (frequently occurring problem) that shouldn’t be one: file paths in statistical software.
What do we mean by “data”?
A note on reproducible GIS by economists: it’s mostly absent. Here are some tips.
I wanted to illustrate the range of the various topics that a Data Editor might face, by taking a fairly random day (2021-01-29) and listing all the various ...
In this post, I’ll pick up questions that have been asked over Twitter or during the 2021-01-19 Fireside chat, in long form (Twitter is not always the best m...
Moved to later post.
We have released the first version of a template README for social sciences at https://social-science-data-editors.github.io/template_README/.
I wanted to highlight a recently (2020-04-30) published article in the AEJ:Economic Policy as an example of reproducibility checking when data is restricted-...