The Study that Keeps on Giving…(Hopefully) in its Final Round
In January I wrote a post about “The Study that Keeps on Giving…” Specifically, this post was about the study conducted and authored by Raj Chetty (Economics Professor at Harvard), John Friedman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Harvard) that was publishedfirst in 2011 (in its non-peer-reviewed and not even internally reviewed form) by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and then published again by NBER in January of 2014 (in the same form) but this time split into two separate studies (see them split here and here).
Their re-release of the same albeit split study was what prompted the title of the initial “The Study that Keeps on Giving…” post. Little did I know then, though, that the reason this study was re-released in split form was that it was soon to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Its non-peer-reviewed publication status was a major source of prior criticism. While journal editors seemed to have suggested the split, NBER seemingly took advantage of this opportunity to publicize this study in two forms, regardless and without prior explanation.
Anyhow, this came to my attention when the study’s lead author – Raj Chetty – emailed me a few weeks ago, emailed Diane Ravitch on the same email, and also apparently emailed other study “critics” at the same time (see prior reviews of this study as per this study’s other notable “critics” here, here, here, and here) to notify all of us that this study made it through peer review and was to be published in a forthcoming issue of theAmerican Economic Review. While Diane and I responded to our joint email (as other critics may have done as well), we ultimately promised Chetty that we would not share the actual contents of any of the approximately 20 email exchanges that went back and forth The Study that Keeps on Giving…(Hopefully) in its Final Round |: