Post

Nick Huntington-Klein

One of my empirical-work econ takes is that I think academia should be *more* open to publishing work based on best-we-can-do weak data, as long as there's really no other way to address the question and that work is very clear about what it can and can't actually say.

30/7/26, 7:48 pm29 reposts184 likes

@eikofried.bsky.social

The one core rule of reviewing papers for me: is the inference consistent with the evidence. So hell yeah, go all out on "we use cross sectional data for causal inference" if you spell out the required assumptions clearly and are careful with inferences.

Austin Slaughter

@austinslaughter.bsky.social

Agree, especially when there are relevant policy decisions that have to be made regardless of the research's existence

Nick Huntington-Klein

Like we don't need a weak entry on what the returns to education are. But there are a ton of questions where something suggestive or with iffy identification would be a clear plus relative to what we have. But this is very hard to publish. Lampposts and lost keys and all that.

Nick Huntington-Klein

The obvious downside is that those results can then be distributed further and taken as more definitive than they deserve.

Nick Huntington-Klein

But the number of useful more-signal-than-noise papers I've skipped bc I know that R2 will peace out between the part of the paper where it becomes clear there's a gap and the part where I take the gap seriously is a lot.

Nick Huntington-Klein

(and besides, many of the "clean" papers have similarly important gaps, they're just ones we're used to so we let them slide. the difference between "this flaw is unacceptable" and "this flaw is fine" is usually a social one not a rigorous one)