Research Discussion Paper – RDP 2021-02 Star Wars at Central Banks

Contents

• Introduction
• Researcher Bias is about Undisclosed Exaggeration
• Our Bias-detection Methods Have Important Strengths and Weaknesses
• Our Summary Statistics Show Important Institutional Differences
• Our Findings Do Not Call for Changes in Research Practices
• We Were Able to Replicate the Original Papers
• Conclusion
• Appendix A : Credibility Safeguards
• Appendix B : Replicating Simonsohn et al (2014) and Brodeur et al (2016)
• References

We thank Cristian Aguilera Arellano for research assistance. For their comments, we thank Hang Banh, Anthony Brassil, Iris Chan, Anna Dreber, Luci Ellis, Denzi Fiebig, Kevin Fox, Mathias Lé, Uri Simonsohn, Michelle van der Merwe, Melissa Wilson and participants at several seminars. James Holt and Paula Drew gave editorial assistance. Adam Gorajek and Andrew Staib acknowledge Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarships. The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve System, the Reserve Bank of Australia or the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Declaration: We are affiliated with the central banks we investigate and thus have a conflict of interest. To protect the credibility of this work, we registered a pre-analysis plan with the Open Science Framework before we collected data. Appendix A explains where to find the plan, discloses our deviations from the plan, and lists other credibility safeguards that we used.