EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The cult of statistical significance. What economists should and should not do to make their data talk

Walter Krämer

No 176, RatSWD Working Papers from German Data Forum (RatSWD)

Abstract: This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in economics and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present article argues that this is good advice in some research areas but not in others. Taking all issues which have appeared so far of the German Economic Review and a recent epidemiological meta-analysis as examples, it shows that there has indeed been a lot of misleading work in the context of significance testing, and that at the same time many promising avenues for fruitfully employing statistical significance tests, disregarded by Ziliak and McCloskey, have not been used.

Pages: 16
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.konsortswd.de/wp-content/uploads/RatSWD_WP_176.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Cult of Statistical Significance – What Economists Should and Should Not Do to Make their Data Talk (2011) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rsw:rswwps:rswwps176

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RatSWD Working Papers from German Data Forum (RatSWD) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RatSWD ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:rsw:rswwps:rswwps176