Thread by @chrisbrunet

Paola Giuliano & Nathan Nunn (@DrNathanNunn) are two superstar econ professors.

Their 2021 paper in @RevEconStudies, now cited over 400 times, can't be replicated.

THREAD 🧵:

Earlier this year, a team of European researchers with @I4Replication published, ''Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change: A Replication of Giuliano and Nunn (2021)''

ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/1…

That replication’s conclusion is devastating:

‘‘This replication … identifies major discrepancies between several econometric specifications described in the article and their corresponding code. We are able to correct most of these mistakes by realigning the code with the text. Once corrections are implemented, we obtain almost invariably a smaller and non-significant coefficient for climatic variability.’’

EJMR discussion of this replication is equally as devastating.



Here is the top comment:

''I am a tenured academic economist. I believe the allegations are serious. I briefly read the abstracts of the criticisms and the response. One of the two sides is lying; there is no third alternative. Those individuals, on both sides, are costing their university money and taking a spot that could be filled by someone else. Given the amount of money and power involved, it's not unreasonable to hire two independent research assistants to evaluate who is lying and proceed with academic misconduct proceedings against the side that lied. This is not a joke. I am disturbed by how everything continues as normal. Not taking action is damaging the credibility of everyone involved, including mine, and is not fair play. I am also disturbed by the other retraction of Giuliano. She admitted the mistake, kudos. But she did only after the comment. The identification strategy she did had a scientific credit regardless of the findings. If her paper is retracted, her paper does not exist. There is at least another person who deserves the credit for being the first comer on that identification and who was damaged.''

— Anonymous Economisteconjobrumors.com/topic/giuliano…

Giuliano and Nunn later responded with a ‘‘correction’’ rather than a retraction, but it didn’t seem to convince anyone:

ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/1…

Both Nunn & Giuliano are repeat offenders — here is another Nunn paper that doesn’t replicate:

drive.google.com/file/d/1l_p9LS…

But what's truly shocking is that Giuliano had her top paper retracted just last year! I had almost forgotten, but I actually wrote about Giuliano’s previous retraction in February 2023:

karlstack.com/p/six-more-aca…

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

''It is worth noting that Dr. Guiliano almost certainly would not have gotten tenure at UCLA without this paper — ReStud is one of the top 5 journals in the world, and she was already a borderline case *with* this paper on her CV. So, she got tenure based on a broken & wrong paper. Classic! Perhaps obtaining tenure could have been the incentive to fudge the code/data, or perhaps this was a bona fide coding error. Impossible to say.''

So, this is her second huge fraud in as many years, involving her two best papers. Her entire career obviously rests on a foundation of deceit, or at best, sheer incompetence. UCLA could make a solid case for her dismissal; she ought to lose her tenure, and she might actually lose this tenure if she were in a state like Florida. But California will probably protect her.

read my entire article:

karlstack.com/p/22-more-acad…

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Karlstack.com

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