Replication and Scientific Standards in Applied Economics A Decade After the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking Project

Abstract

Since early 1993, the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has made the data and programs for articles published in the Bank's Review available to the public on its electronic bulletin board.(1) During the first year, files from articles in the Review were downloaded from the bulletin board more than 200 times. More recently, about 30 files have been downloaded each month. The Research Department of the Bank develops the program and data files on our bulletin board during a replication of each article prior to publication. A research analyst first checks the author's data against original sources. Because databases may have been updated or revised after the research began, this can require searching for the original published data. In a few cases, data errors have been corrected, fortunately with only minor impact on the author's results. Next, an annotated version of the computer program is prepared and all statistical results recalculated. Finally, bibliographic and other references are checked by the analyst against original source documents. We believe this practice both assures the accuracy of the empirical results and allows the interested reader to delve into the details of the author's research.