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 Rogoff” 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.

1. The Wall Street Journal
   Reinhart-Rogoff Response to Critique
   
2. The Financial Times (Chris Cook)
   Reinhart-Rogoff recrunch the numbers
3. The Economist
   Revisiting Reinhart-Rogoff
4. Slate.com (Matthew Yglesias)
   “Is The Reinhart-Rogoff Result Based on a Simple Spreadsheet Error?“
5. Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)
   “An update on the Reinhart and Rogoff critique and some observations“
6. Next New Deal (Mike Konczal)
   “Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.“
7. Christopher Gandrud
   “Reinhart & Rogoff: Everyone makes coding mistakes, we need to make it easy to find them + Graphing uncertainty“
8. Simply Statistics (Roger Peng)
   “I wish economists made better plots“
9. Paul Krugman 
   “Holy Coding Error, Batman“
10. Phillip Price
    “Data problems, coding errors…what can be done?“
11. Next New Deal (Mike Konczal)
    “Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.“