Jack Fitzgerald
@jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
1.4K followers 250 following 110 posts
Economics PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Tinbergen Institute. Working on applied econometrics, replication, and economics of science. https://jack-fitzgerald.github.io. Likes/reposts aren’t endorsements, views are my own.
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jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Had a great time presenting my job market paper at the Lindau Nobel Meeting in Economic Sciences! 🔗 : osf.io/d7sqr_v1/

#LINOecon #EconSky
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Registration closes July 4! Come join us in-person or online in Amsterdam!
i4replication.bsky.social
Only a few days left to register to the Amsterdam Replication Games on July 19. Virtual participation is possible and coauthorship to a meta paper is granted.

Register: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Dutch academics, please share - replication games are coming to Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on July 19! If you live in the Netherlands, or want a good reason to visit, come take a day to network, hone your skills, and potentially coauthor a paper. Registration: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
i4replication.bsky.social
#GDRI_rep Update 7: Retraction! Our comment of "Parent–teacher meetings and student outcomes: Evidence from a developing country" has led to the paper being retracted. Our comment is accepted as is.

Short 🧵
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
This will likely be a good initiative, conditional on it not substituting for the journal publishing full comments. Publication is an important incentive for reproducibility/robustness analyses and substantive empirical critiques almost always take more than one page.
ecmaeditors.bsky.social
We are pleased to announce an experiment intended to stimulate academic discussion and exchange, centered on papers published in Econometrica 1/5
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
theoretical also having a real bad year in 2000
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
i4replication.bsky.social
#GDRI_rep Update 5: We have a new report. We reproduced the paper entitled "Partisan Effects of Information Campaigns in Competitive Authoritarian Elections: Evidence from Bangladesh" by Ahmed, Hodler and Islam published at the Economic Journal. See below for links to report and authors' responses.
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
The logo for the Journal of Marginally Significant Results naturally features a series of confidence intervals hanging out anxiously close to zero
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Do the tables get imaginary numbers?
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
What academic journal should I start? Wrong answers only
Email inviting me, a PhD candidate, to be the editor-in-chief of a brand new journal of my choosing.
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
i4replication.bsky.social
#GDRI_rep Update 4: We have a new report. We reproduced the paper entitled "Parent–teacher meetings and student outcomes" by Islam @ European Economic Review. See below for links to report and author's response.
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Thank you @carlislerainey.bsky.social for boosting my job market paper! I’’m a fan of your prior work on this topic.

If you want to learn more, check out the paper and my BIBAP seminar on it tomorrow, 3/12 7 AM CET/5 PM Sydney time.

www.unsw.edu.au/business/beh...
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
johnholbein1.bsky.social
#5 Here's another recent critique of close elections RDDs.

It's unclear whether there is actually good evidence against potentially fatal precise manipulation around the cutoff in these designs.
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
I'll be waking up early (7 AM CET) on Tuesday, March 12 to present my job market paper at 5 PM Sydney time! If you're awake too, stop by to hear me talk about equivalence testing, replication-based methods research, and the robustness of null results in economics!
Paper title: The Need for Equivalence Testing in Economics. Written by Jack Fitzgerald, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute. Date: February 5, 2025. Abstract: Equivalence testing can provide statistically significant evidence that economic relationships are practically negligible. I demonstrate its necessity in a large-scale reanalysis of estimates defending 135 null claims made in 81 recent articles from top economics journals. 36-63% of estimates defending the average null claim fail lenient equivalence tests. In a prediction platform survey, researchers accurately predict that equivalence testing failure rates will significantly exceed levels which they deem acceptable. Obtaining equivalence testing failure rates that these researchers deem acceptable requires arguing that nearly 75% of published estimates in economics are practically equal to zero. These results imply that Type II error rates are unacceptably high throughout economics, and that many null findings in economics reflect low power rather than truly negligible relationships. I provide economists with guidelines and commands in Stata and R for conducting credible equivalence testing and practical significance testing in future research.
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Relatedly, I also develop new equivalence testing methods for testing running variable (RV) manipulation in RDD. In 36 RDD publications, I find >44% of RV density discontinuities at treatment cutoffs can't be significantly bounded beneath 50% upward jumps. 🧵: bsky.app/profile/jack...
johnholbein1.bsky.social
Lots of talk on X today about rethinking the results produced by close elections RDDs.

So, I thought I'd drop a few recent articles about issues that arise in this space so that folks can have them all in one place. 1/N
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
i4replication.bsky.social
#GDRI_rep Update 2: I4R sent a report to the original authors for the PLOS One article "“Food insecurity and mental health of women during COVID-19: Evidence from a developing country". All authors have now emailed PLOS One to withdraw their names. osf.io/7tzek/
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
i4replication.bsky.social
#GDRI_rep Update 1: I4R are now reproducing all published papers that use data from GDRI, or are closely related in other ways. Here is a first update on our work. 🧵
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
Our proposal for post-publication review: “our system would add only 1 percent to the total reviewing effort, while providing important perspectives on papers representing more than one-quarter of the citations received by these influential journals.”
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/02/26/pp/
Reposted by Jack Fitzgerald
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
As a coauthor on the AEJ:AE report, it’s a lot. Oh my god, It’s a lot. In that paper, outcomes are inconsistently handled both in the code and in the field, the paper’s data is connected to a bunch of other experiments, and we find irregularities in the raw survey files.
i4replication.bsky.social
After being alerted about possible misconduct, the I4R are reproducing published papers that use data from a specific NGO (GDRI). This thread releases the first 2 reports and provides more information about the work and responses/statements from authors journals and journals. 🧵
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Expat in NL here: you would also call it Den Bosch if you had to pronounce ‘s Hertogenbosch often enough
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
I had a wonderful time presenting my job market paper at RWI Essen! Thank you @jrgptrs.bsky.social and Julian Rose for hosting and organizing!
jrgptrs.bsky.social
Last week we had @jackfitzgerald.bsky.social with us presenting his work on equivalence testing. Economists typically interpret null results as the absence of an effect. This is wrong. Proper testing is particularly important for robustness checks in IV & RDD settings www.econstor.eu/handle/10419...
jackfitzgerald.bsky.social
Additional context: this was just in my paper. Different teams replicated different papers depending on which Games they attended and which software they used. The main results control for Games-software fixed effects to partial out reproducibility difficulty across different replication packages.