Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer: Reply to Kataria

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Abstract

In this paper we reply to Mitesh Kataria’s comment, which criticized the simulations of Maniadis, Tufano, and List (2014, Am. Econ. Rev. 104(1), 277–290). We view these simulations as a means to illustrating the fact that we economists are unaware of the value of key variables that determine the credibility of our own empirical findings. Such variables include priors (i.e., the pre-study probability that a tested phenomenon is true) and the statistical power of the empirical design. Economists should not hesitate to use Bayesian tools and meta-analysis in order to quantify what we know about these variables.

This article is a response to One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer: A Comment on Zacharias Maniadis, Fabio Tufano, and John List by Mitesh Kataria (EJW, January 2014).