The Power of Bias in Economics Research

By John P. A. Ioannidis, T. Stanley, Hristos Doucouliagos. 2017

563 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate two critical dimensions of the credibility of empirical economics research: statistical power and bias. We survey 159 empirical economics literatures that draw upon 64,076 estimates of economic parameters reported in more than 6,700 empirical studies. Half of the research areas have nearly 90% of their results under‐powered. The median statistical power is 18%, or less. A simple weighted average of those reported results that are adequately powered (power ≥ 80%) reveals that nearly 80% of the reported effects in these empirical economics literatures are exaggerated; typically, by a factor of two and with one‐third inflated by a factor of four or more.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6d511ead17296dd289a31ec8d898f5eb110f4f1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Decision Sciences

1. Tomáš Havránek
2. Hristos Doucouliagos
3. P. Bom
4. Katja Rost
5. Zuzana Irsova
6. Jon P. Nelson
7. P. Laroche
8. Christoph Engel

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Tomáš Havránek
2. Hristos Doucouliagos
3. W. R. Reed
4. T. Stanley
5. Katja Rost
6. P. Bom
7. M. Ugur
8. S. Gechert

In Safety Research

1. Tomáš Havránek
2. P. Bom
3. T. Stanley
4. Katja Rost
5. Hristos Doucouliagos
6. M. Paldam

Citations in the corpus

• Are women more generous than men? A meta-analysis (2021, unknown): “Power problems have previously been reported in economics in general (Ioannidis et al. 2017) as well as for the DG (Ortmann and Zhang 2015).”
• REPORTING GUIDELINES FOR META‐ANALYSIS IN ECONOMICS (2020, methodology): “…have assessed the incidence and impact of publication bias and p-hacking in economics (Brodeur et al., 2016; Bruns and Ioannidis, 2016; Ioannidis et al., 2017; Brodeur et al., 2018; Christensen and Miguel, 2018), and attention has turned to journal editorial policies (Blanco-Perez and…”
• The influence of hidden researcher decisions in applied microeconomics (2020, unknown): “Such metascientific studies in economics sometimes examine published work either through the lens of its unconsidered statistical properties (Ioannidis et al., 2017; Young, 2018).”