Intro
Throughout the month of February 2026, 19 replicators are participating in a new edition of the Replication Games in the Netherlands, this time focused on one of the most pressing challenges in modern social science: reproducibility with restricted-access administrative data.
Co-organised by ODISSEI and the Institute for Replication, the event brought together participants from multiple institutes across the Netherlands and beyond. Divided into six teams, replicators are attempting to reproduce and stress-test findings from six papers published in top economics journals within the past five years. Replicators, who have access to the secure environment for the whole month of February 2026, gathered in Utrecht for an intensive three-day in-person hackathlon on 11-13 February.
All selected studies relied primarily on administrative microdata from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), and were accompanied by code and documentation. With nearly half of recent top economics papers depending on restricted-use data, understanding whether — and how — these papers’ findings can be independently reproduced is more important than ever.
The challenge of administrative data
Working with administrative data is both powerful and complex. The CBS microdata infrastructure offers rich data on the entire Dutch population for scientific research, but access takes place within a secure remote environment. That security is essential for protecting confidentiality, yet it introduces practical challenges for replication. Teams could not simply download datasets and run scripts locally. Instead, they worked within the CBS Microdata Environment, a secure remote access system managed by CBS, navigating dataset approval procedures, computing constraints, and output checking rules. The CBS Replication Games provide useful insights about opportunities and constraints of replication in secure environments. Results will also be used to inform potential infrastructural developments to facilitate the reproducibility of projects that use administrative data.
Stay tuned
Preliminary results and lessons learned from the CBS Replication Games will be presented at the International Population Data Linkage Network Conference 2026 (IPDLN), taking place in Rotterdam, 13–16 July 2026.
We look forward to sharing what worked, what proved challenging, and what this means for the future of reproducible research with administrative microdata.
Lenka Fiala, Jack Fitzgerald, Kasia Karpinska, Angelica Maineri