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1 - Ethical Guidelines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

Philip Hans Franses
Philip Hans Franses
Affiliation:
Erasmus University
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Summary

The first chapter contains an overview of what is accepted as good practice. We review several general ethical guidelines. These can be used to appreciate good research and to indicate where and how research does not adhere to them. Good practice is “what we all say we (should) adhere to.” In the second part of this chapter, the focus is more on specific ethical guidelines for statistical analysis. Of course, there is overlap with the more general guidelines, but there are also a few specifically relevant to statistics: Examples are misinterpreting p values and malpractice such as p hacking and harking.

Keywords

good research practiceethical guidelines for statistical practicesuggestive graphsp valuesp hackingharkingmultiple testingcorrelationcausality
Type
Chapter
Information
Ethics in Econometrics
A Guide to Research Practice
 , pp. 11 - 33
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

A highly informative and well-written book on how numbers and graphs can fool us.

To gain some impression of parts of the forthcoming chapters.

A key publication addressing the shortcomings of much research in social psychology.

Bergstrom, Carl T. and West, Jevin D. (2020), Calling Bullshit, New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Jerven, Morten (2013), Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Peter E. (2002), Sinning in the basement: What are the rules? The ten commandments of applied econometrics, Journal of Economic Surveys, 16 (4), 569–589.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simmons, Joseph P., Nelson, Leif D., and Simonsohn, Uri (2011), False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant, Psychological Science, 22 (11), 1359–1366.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

On Replications

An early attempt to replicate results, with difficult to obtain original data and computer programs.

Dewald, William G., Thursby, Jerry G., and Anderson, Richard G. (1986), Replication in empirical economics: The journal of money, credit and banking project, American Economic Review, 76 (4), 587–603.Google Scholar
Harvey, Campbell R. (2019), Editorial: Replication in financial economics, Critical Finance Review, 8 (1–2), 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serra-Garcia, Marta and Gneezy, Uri (2021), Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones, Science Advances, 7, eabd1705.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Interesting Reading about Why Ethical Guidelines Are Not Followed

Brodeur, Abel, Cook, Nikolai, and Heyes, Anthony (2020), Methods matter: p-hacking and publication bias in causal analysis in economics, American Economic Review, 110 (11), 3634–3660.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camerer, Colin F. et al. (2016), Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics, Science, 351 (6286), 1433–1436.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cox, Adam, Craig, Russell, and Tourish, Dennis (2018), Retraction statements and research malpractice in economics, Research Policy, 47 (5), 924–935.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCloskey, Donald N. (1985), The loss function has been mislaid: The rhetoric of significance tests, American Economic Review, 75 (2), 201–205.Google Scholar
Necker, Sarah (2014), Scientific misbehavior in economics, Research Policy, 43 (10), 1747–1759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vivalt, Eva (2019), Specification searching and significance inflation across time, methods and disciplines, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 81 (4), 797–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Recommended Reading

www.amstat.org/ASA/Your-Career/Ethical-Guidelines-for-Statistical-Practice.aspx.Google Scholar
Vardeman, Stephen B. and Morris, Max D. (2003), Statistics and ethics, The American Statistician, 57 (1), 21–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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