Funding
30 December 2023
We are grateful for the funding provided by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for our project entitled "Transparency, Reproducibility and Replicability in Economics"! PI is Lars Vilhuber. Co-PI is Abel Brodeur. Here is a summary of proposal.
PROJECT GOAL: The purpose of the proposed research activities is to advance the frontiers of what we know about the reliability and robustness of scientific findings, and provide technical skills and knowledge to the next generation of researchers.
OBJECTIVES: Aim 1: Enabling reproducible science and re-analyzing scientific findings. Aim 2: Organizing and synthesizing the existing evidence. Aim 3: Training the next generation of researchers and policy-makers.
PROPOSED ACTIVITIES: We develop, disseminate, and actively teach training materials that are specifically tailored to known gaps in training early in the research lifecycle, identified through the analysis of pre-publication and post-publication replication packages. We organize Replication Games, and prepare training materials for organizers (train the trainer), so that decentralized organization of future Games can occur.
EXPECTED PRODUCTS: Materials to train a broader range of organizers of Replication Games; 6 Replication Games in each year of the grant; 750 participants in all Replication Games sanctioned by the Institute for Replication per year. 100 replication reports per year; 1 mega-paper summarizing each year’s outcomes from Replication Games. Materials for improved skills training of graduate and early career researchers focusing on reproducibility and replicability; 3 workshops (of which 1 online) per year; 60 participants per year.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES: Improved trust in economic science through greater reproducibility of research and transparency of outcomes. Improved technical skills of future leaders in economics, facilitating greater reproducibility and efficiency of the research process. Through their attempt to falsify past evidence, reproducibility and replication efforts contribute in essential ways to the production of scientific knowledge. They will permit the scientific community to assess which findings are robust, making science a self-correcting system when they are not, with major downstream effects on policy-making.
This project starts in September 2023 and ends in August 2025.