Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Synthetic Karl Marx and His Clumsy Critic

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Abstract

In his second critique of our paper “The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence,” Joseph Francis presents an eclectic array of attacks on our findings. In this response we show that Francis makes basic econometric and measurement errors when building his arguments. Through additional testing, we show that our original results remain statistically significant and robust to Francis’s challenges.

This article is a response to From Synthetic Marx to Synthetic Kafka: A Rejoinder to Magness and Makovi by Joseph Francis (EJW, March 2025).

Data and code used in this research is available here.

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Volume (Issue)
Pages
108–141
Published
JEL classification
B14, B24, B31, B51, Z10
Keywords
P-values, smoothing, synthetic control, Karl Marx
Downloads
1,122 article downloads
866 complete issue downloads
Total: 1,988

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