<mods:mods xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-7.xsd"><mods:titleInfo><mods:title>Essays in Econometrics</mods:title></mods:titleInfo><mods:typeOfResource authority="primo">dissertations</mods:typeOfResource><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Vu, Patrick</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">creator</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Roth, Jonathan</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Advisor</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Hull, Peter</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Reader</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Kitagawa, Toru</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Reader</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="corporate"><mods:namePart>Brown University. Department of Economics</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">sponsor</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:originInfo><mods:copyrightDate>2024</mods:copyrightDate></mods:originInfo><mods:physicalDescription><mods:extent>vii, 181 p.</mods:extent><mods:digitalOrigin>born digital</mods:digitalOrigin></mods:physicalDescription><mods:note type="thesis">Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2024</mods:note><mods:genre authority="aat">theses</mods:genre><mods:abstract>This dissertation contains three essays in econometrics. A common theme is the impact of publication bias on the statistical credibility of published research, reproducibility, and evidence-based policy.
The first chapter examines how adopting improved but enlarged standard errors for individual studies can inadvertently lead to higher bias in the studies selected for publication. Intuitively, this is because larger standard errors raise the bar on statistical significance, which exacerbates publication bias. Despite the possibility of higher bias, I show that the coverage of published confidence intervals unambiguously increases. I illustrate these phenomena using a newly constructed dataset on the adoption of clustered standard errors in the difference-in-differences literature between 2000 and 2009. Clustering is associated with a near doubling in the magnitude of published effect sizes. I estimate a model of the publication process and find that clustering led to large improvements in coverage but also sizable increases in bias.
The second chapter examines why replication rates for experimental studies are low in the social sciences. I emphasize that issues with common power calculations in replication studies may play an important role. In a simple model of the publication process, I show that issues with the way that replication power is commonly calculated imply we should always expect replication rates to fall below their intended power targets, even when original studies are unbiased and there is no p-hacking or treatment effect heterogeneity. Empirically, I find that a parsimonious model accounting only for issues with power calculations can fully explain observed replication rates in experimental economics and social science, and two-thirds of the replication gap in psychology.
The third chapter, which is joint work with Toru Kitagawa, examines how publication bias can impact evidence-based policy. For minimax regret policymakers, we characterize the optimal treatment rule with selective publication against statistically insignificant results. We then show that the optimal publication rule which minimizes maximum regret is non-selective. This means that the optimal publication regime for policy choice in the minimax regret framework is also consistent with valid statistical inference in scientific research.</mods:abstract><mods:subject authority="fast" authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast" valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01017463"><mods:topic>Meta-analysis</mods:topic></mods:subject><mods:subject authority="fast" authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast" valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00901574"><mods:topic>Econometrics</mods:topic></mods:subject><mods:subject><mods:topic>Replications</mods:topic></mods:subject><mods:subject><mods:topic>Publication Bias</mods:topic></mods:subject><mods:language><mods:languageTerm authority="iso639-2b">English</mods:languageTerm></mods:language><mods:recordInfo><mods:recordContentSource authority="marcorg">RPB</mods:recordContentSource><mods:recordCreationDate encoding="iso8601">20240423</mods:recordCreationDate></mods:recordInfo></mods:mods>