2025 Best EI Article Award Announced
The Editors of Economic Inquiry are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Best Article Award! Congratulations to Ankel-Peters, Fiala, and Neubauer for their outstanding work.
"Is economics self-correcting? Replications in the American Economic Review"
- Jörg Ankel-Peters, RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
- Nathan Fiala, University of Connecticut
- Florian Neubauer, RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the impact of replications published as comments in the American Economic Review between 2010 and 2020. We examine their citations and influence on the original papers' (OPs) subsequent citations. Our results show that comments are barely cited, and they do not affect the OP's citations—even if the comment diagnoses substantive problems. Furthermore, we conduct an opinion survey among replicators and authors and find that there often is no consensus on whether the OP's contribution sustains. We conclude that the economics literature does not self-correct, and that robustness and replicability are hard to define in economics.