Size Matters: The Standard Error of Regressions in the American Economic Review
Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey
Volume 1, Number 2, August 2004 Eight years ago, in "The Standard Error of Regressions," we showed how significance testing was used during the 1980s in the American Economic Review. The economists and calculators replied, “Don’t fret: things are getting better."
We are very willing to believe that our colleagues have since the 1980s stopped making an elementary error. But like them we are empirical scientists. And so we applied the same 19-item questionnaire of our 1996 paper to all the full-length empirical papers of the next decade of the AER.
If the AER were to test papers for cogency, and refused to publish papers that used fit irrelevantly as a standard of oomph, economics would in a few years be transformed into a field with empirical standards. At present (we can say until someone starts claiming that in the 2000s practice has improved), we have shown, it has none.
[The editors of EJW are grateful to the editors of the Journal of Socio-Economics for allowing simultaneous publication of this paper, which was originally submitted and accepted by the Journal of Socio-Economics.]
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