When economic professors making simple (MS Excel) coding mistakes …
Basic MS Excel mistake in a paper published by two Harvard Economic Professors in a top-tier Economic journal!?
This week, the hottest topic in economics or even in academia as a whole would be the paper publishes by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin | (HAP) on 4/15/2013 critiquing a widely cited paper by Reinhart and Rogoff on the debt ration and GDP of many countries titled “Growth in a Time of Debt“.
What is exciting is that HAP argue that R&R has made an error when using MS Excel to analysis such macroeconomic data. That paper by HAP titled “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogo ff” would probably one of legendary critique papers in economics to date.
As we can expect, there are many feedbacks from both academics and non-academic world. The following is the list of articles discussing this incidences.
- The Wall Street Journal
Reinhart-Rogoff Response to Critique
- The Financial Times (Chris Cook)
Reinhart-Rogoff recrunch the numbers - The Economist
Revisiting Reinhart-Rogoff - Slate.com (Matthew Yglesias)
“Is The Reinhart-Rogoff Result Based on a Simple Spreadsheet Error?“ - Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)
“An update on the Reinhart and Rogoff critique and some observations“ - Next New Deal (Mike Konczal)
“Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.“ - Christopher Gandrud
“Reinhart & Rogoff: Everyone makes coding mistakes, we need to make it easy to find them + Graphing uncertainty“ - Simply Statistics (Roger Peng)
“I wish economists made better plots“ - Paul Krugman
“Holy Coding Error, Batman“ - Phillip Price
“Data problems, coding errors…what can be done?“ - Next New Deal (Mike Konczal)
“Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.“
Pairach Piboonrungroj, PhD 