A Practical Guide to Registered Reports for Economists

Thibaut Arpinon () and Romain Espinosa ()
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Thibaut Arpinon: CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Romain Espinosa: CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - Université Paris-Saclay - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: The current publication system in economics has encouraged the inflation of positive results in empirical papers. Registered Reports, also called Pre-Results Reviews, are a new submission format for empirical work that takes pre-registration one step further. In Registered Reports, researchers write their papers before running the study and commit to a detailed data collection process and analysis plan. After a first-stage review, a journal can give an In-Principle-Acceptance guaranteeing that the paper will be published if the authors carry out their data collection and analysis as pre-specified. We here propose a practical guide to Registered Reports for empirical economists. We illustrate the major problems that Registered Reports address (phacking, HARKing, forking, and publication bias), and present practical guidelines on how to write and review Registered Reports (e.g., the data-analysis plan, power analysis, and correction for multiple-hypothesis testing), with R and STATA codes. We provide specific examples for experimental economics, and show how research design can be improved to maximize statistical power. Last, we discuss some tools that authors, editors, and referees can use to evaluate Registered Reports (checklist, study-design table, and quality assessment).

Keywords: Registered Reports; practical guide; pre-registration; p-hacking; HARKing; multiplehypothesis testing; power analysis; the smallest effect size of interest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03897719v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in Journal of the Economic Science Association, In press, ⟨10.1007/s40881-022-00123-1⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03897719

DOI: 10.1007/s40881-022-00123-1

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