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Welcome to the Many-Economists Project

This is the homepage for the Many-Economists Project. The Many-Economists project is a follow-up to Huntington-Klein et al., 2021, which you can find summarized here. In that study, multiple researchers each performed independent replications of two original studies, and we looked for differences between the decisions that had been made. Not only did results differ across researchers, but so did plenty of decisions at both the analytic and data-cleaning stages.

In this new project, I plan to recruit up to 200 researchers to independently complete the same research task. Then, there will be several rounds where you will revise your original results. These will follow either peer review, or a change in the research task that standardizes some of the choices made, for example providing a data set in which key variables are pre-prepared instead of having researchers create their own. Without revealing the specific hypotheses of the project, these multiple rounds of revision will allow us to better understand the parts of research that are least standardized across researchers, whether standardization of research methods is desirable, and what tools might be most effective in standardizing research decisions, if that is desirable.

Participation is open broadly, and you qualify if any of the following are true about you:

  • You are academic faculty working in applied microeconomics
  • You are a graduate student with a published or forthcoming paper in applied microeconomics
  • You hold a PhD and work in a job where you write non-academic reports using tools to estimate causal effects from applied microeconomics

This means that the project will include, researchers in the non-academic private or public sectors, as well as graduate students who have a published or forthcoming paper. Researchers are encouraged to participate from any country, of any gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual or gender identity, and at any stage in their careers.

Participation

Full participants in this project will receive $2,000 and coauthorship on the paper describing the results of the many-economists project.

Full participation entails completing every stage of the project, which includes the original research task, several revisions to your work, and possibly some peer review of others’ work. Your first replication task should take you about as long as you’d expect to spend on creating the results section for a short Letters-style publication. After that, the project is expected to take several hours of your time every few months, concluding in early 2024.

PLEASE VISIT THE SIGN-UP PAGE TO SIGN UP

Support

This project is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.