Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Thank you, Alexi.

So Obel puts aside this whole idea of an empirical reckoning, and he moves on to other economic projects.

He gets tenure, and eventually he learns that his little paper has become kind of a sleeper hit.

For his part, Abel wondered if there was anything he could do.

Like, not just study the problem, but actually help fix it.

The published research is the cleaned up version.

But first, you'd have to get the code.

People weren't in the habit then of publishing all their data and code.

And when he emailed researchers asking, nobody responded.

So he decided to create an official seeming institution.

So in 2022, he creates a website for a thing he starts calling the Institute for Replication.

So Abel can get the data and the code.

But there's still a second problem, which was the question of scale.

Replicating one paper at a time was not going to do much to change the system.

What he needed was to create the sense within the academic community that anybody's work could be checked at any time.

It would just be, like, 10, maybe 15 people.

Abel posted about it on social media.

He starts collecting papers that people could replicate, and he puts everyone into teams by their field.

Health economics, development economics...

The underlying data, upon which this entire paper rested, had been merged improperly.