We investigate the long-run impacts of a one-time randomized entrepreneurial cash grant in Uganda during COVID-19 lockdowns, twelve years after the intervention. Previous research documented considerable positive effects after four years, which vanished for income after nine years, while some structural changes persisted. For the 12-year follow-up, we find positive effects on employment and income, but for men only, and no effects on food security. These gender-specific effects might not be the last word on the program’s long-term impact. Rather, our paper emphasizes that the timing of follow-up studies matters, particularly in the presence of shocks such as the lockdowns. 

Presentations: Verein für Socialpolitik (VfS) Jahrestagung 2024; 22nd EUDN PhD Workshop on Development Economics; World Bank SPJ GP Seminar Series; German Development Economics Conference (GDEC); 7th RGS Doctoral Conference in Economics 

A carbon tax will not curb current emissions in sub-Saharan Africa and is unlikely to prevent future carbon lock-in effects. Meanwhile, a carbon tax could hit the poor in this region, thus the international community should be careful in pushing sub-Saharan Africa towards carbon taxation. 

Robustness reproductions and replicability discussions are on the rise in response to concerns about a potential credibility crisis in economics. This paper proposes a protocol to structure reproducibility and replicability assessments, with a focus on robustness. Starting with a computational reproduction upon data availability, the protocol encourages replicators to prespecify robustness tests, prior to implementing them. The protocol contains three different reporting tools to streamline the presentation of results. Beyond reproductions, our protocol assesses adherence to the pre-analysis plans in the replicated papers as well as external and construct validity. Our ambition is to put often controversial debates between replicators and replicated authors on a solid basis and contribute to an improved replication culture in economics. 

Fossil fuel subsidy removal may hinder access to clean fuels like LPG. Our analysis of urban Senegal shows that LPG use fell sharply after subsidies ended in 2009, despite later price drops. Households switched to charcoal, and the new availability of energy-efficient charcoal stoves made a return to LPG less appealing. This highlights how energy transitions among the poor are price sensitive, with implications for subsidy and carbon-tax policies. 

Presentations: German Development Economics Conference (GDEC); Leibniz Environment and Development Symposium 2023

Banerjee, Duflo, and Sharma (BDS, 2021, American Economic Review: Insights, 3, 471–86) conduct a 10-year follow-up of a randomized transfer program in West Bengal. BDS find large effects on consumption, food security, income, and health. We conduct a replicability assessment. First, we successfully reproduce the results, thanks to a perfectly documented reproduction package. Results are robust across alternative specifications. We furthermore assess the paper's pre-specification diligence and the reporting in terms of external and construct validity. While the paper refers to a pre-registration, it lacks a pre-analysis plan. Assessing the validity of findings for other contexts is difficult absent necessary details about the exact treatment delivery. 

Presentations: German Development Economics Conference (GDEC)

Charcoal is an important cooking fuel in urban Africa. In this paper, we estimate the current number of charcoal users and project trends for the coming decades. Charcoal production is often not effectively regulated, and it hence contributes to forest degradation. Moreover, charcoal has adverse health effects for its users. At the same time, charcoal constitutes an important income source in deprived rural areas, while the current alternative, gas, is a mostly imported fossil fuel. We find that 195 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on charcoal as their primary cooking fuel and gauge that another 200 million use charcoal as secondary fuel. Our scenarios suggest that clean cooking initiatives are outweighed by strong urban population growth and hence charcoal usage is expected to remain high over the coming decades. Policies should therefore target end-users, forest management, and regulation of charcoal production to enable sustainable production and use of charcoal.

Presentations: 5th Annual Meeting of the Sustainable Energy Transition Initiative (SETI)

This report compiles our recent comment on Ahmed, Hodler, and Islam (2024, AHI-2024) and our response to the authors' reply to our comment. Our report is one element in a concerted forensic reproduction of studies based on data collected by GDRI, a Bangladesh-based survey company. We appreciate the authors' acknowledgment of discrepancies in AHI-2024. These are consequential admissions given the forensic nature of this report. We also clarify that these discrepancies are likely to drive AHI-2024's main results. Furthermore, our response shows that the authors' reply contains new contradictions. Overall, our investigation of the paper, the study's documentation, and its replication package raise serious concerns about the integrity of the data and the study design.

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators’ experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes.

Rogowski et al. (2022) use secondary data to study the impact of historic postal infrastructure on economic development, both cross-country and within the US. Their results suggest a large positive effect of post offices on economic development that is robust across various sensitivity checks. We successfully computationally reproduce all results. In a robustness assessment, we find the results to be robust to simple changes in the analysis but observe some sensitivity to accounting for spatial trends in the cross-country analysis. Additionally, we correct a coding inconsistency, showing that in the corrected version, one main robustness check for the US-analysis is no longer supporting the result. Despite this, we find the results to be overall robust given the numerous analyses and robustness checks in the original paper. 

Unsuccessful replications often lead to fierce debates between replicators and original authors. This paper investigates whether arguably impartial experts reach consensus on a famous yet unsettled replication debate about the seminal paper by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) and the replication by Albouy (2012). We successfully recruited experts from the pool of scholars citing one of the involved or similar articles. In a structured online questionnaire, we elicited the extent to which these experts align with either the original authors or opposing perspectives. Furthermore, the survey assessed whether the expert’s priors change after reading descriptive summaries of the original paper and the replication. We find that there is no consensus on whether the original results hold or not. Experts slightly lean towards the replicator's side, especially those with more professional experience, yet large parts also support the original authors. We conclude by discussing the epistemic implications of unresolved replication debates in economics. Our paper might inspire more work on using expert knowledge to interpret scientific controversies.  

The replication crisis has raised concerns about the robustness of empirical findings in economics and related fields, particularly outside lab settings where researcher decisions influence results. Robustness reproductions systematically vary analytical choices to assess the stability of original findings, yet debates on their conclusions remain inconclusive. To address this, we introduce a robustness dashboard that visually summarizes robustness reproductions through intuitive indicators. The dashboard aggregates key measures, including the proportion of analysis paths that support the original result, effect size variation, and p-value fluctuations. It complements existing tools like specification curves by providing an overview across multiple analytical paths and is adaptable to individual studies or large-scale replication projects. The robustness dashbaord enhances transparency in robustness assessments and contributes to more structured discussions on reproducibility.