Benjamin DK Wood

Blogs by author

Reflections on replication research: a conversation with Paul Winters

Benjamin DK Wood 03 November 2015 blog  

Replication research is often the space of junior researchers. As a well-cited research economist, with multiple international organisation affiliations, Paul Winters stands out in this space. I recently caught up with Paul to discuss his co-authored replication study of Galiani’s and Schargrodsky’s influential paper Property rights for the poor: Effects of land titling.

Replication research promotes open discourse

Benjamin DK Wood 23 July 2015 blog  

The just-released International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE) suite of publications reexamining the effectiveness of deworming in Kenya demonstrates the potential impact of replication research. The headline publication is a 3ie-funded replication study.

How to peer review replication research

Annette Brown, Benjamin DK Wood 07 January 2015 blog  

“The 3ie replication process differs in important ways from the standard research community-led peer-review process in academic journals. We have been explicitly instructed by 3ie staff not to discuss our experiences with the replication process at any length in this note, including our views on the weaknesses of their current system and the review standards they employ.

Requiring fuel gauges: A pitch for justifying impact evaluation sample size assumptions

Eric Djimeu, Benjamin DK Wood 17 October 2014 blog  

We expect researchers to defend their assumptions when they write papers or present at seminars. Well, we expect them to defend most of their assumptions. However, the assumptions behind their sample size, determined by their power calculations, are rarely discussed. Sample sizes and power calculations matter. Power calculations determine sample size requirements, which match budget constraints with minimum sample size requirements.

When is an error not an error?

Annette Brown, Benjamin DK Wood 31 January 2014 blog  
Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (HAP) in their now famous replication study of Reinhart and Rogoff’s (R&R) seminal article on public debt and economic growth use the word “error” 45 times. At 3ie, we are more than a year into our replication programme, and we are seeing a similar propensity for replication researchers to use the word “error” (or “mistake” or “wrong”) and for this language to cause contentious discussions between the original authors and replication researchers.