What the Reinhart & Rogoff Debacle Really Shows: Verifying Empirical Results Needs to be Routine

http://themonkeycage.org/2013/04/19/what-the-reinhart-rogoff-debacle-really-shows-verifying-empirical-results-needs-to-be-routine/

From the site:

There’s been an enormous amount of buzz since a study was released this week questioning the methodology in a published paper. The paper under fire is Reinhart and Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt” and the firing is being done by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin in their article “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff.” Herndon, Ash, and Pollin claim to have found “spreadsheet errors, omission of available data, weighting, and transcription” in the original research which, when corrected, significantly reduce the magnitude of the original findings. These corrections were possible because of openness in economics, and this openness needs to be extended to make all computational publications reproducible.