The strategies of economic research - An empirical study

Martin Paldam (mpaldam@econ.au.dk)
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Martin Paldam: Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Denmark, Postal: 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University

Abstract: The paper analyzes the structure of strategies of economic research on a sample of all regular research papers in 10 general interest journals every 5th year from 1997 to 2017. It is 3,415 papers, with an annual upward trend of 3.3%. I have classified the papers into eight categories: The fraction in theory and empirics are almost equal large. Most empiric papers use the classic strategy, which derives an operational model from theory and run regressions. Several trends are highly significant - notably two main ones: The fraction of theoretical papers has fallen by 26 pp (percentage points), while the fraction of papers using the classic strategy has increased by 15 pp. Many papers using the classic strategy have been analyzed using meta-analysis, which show that the typical paper exaggerate the results reported substantially. There is no reason to believe that other strategies have smaller problems.

Keywords: Research strategies; survey of journals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2018-06-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-knm
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