Our friends in Economics

There seems to be a very unpleasant spat going on over at the American Economic Review. The details can be gleaned here. The crux of the matter is that an article scheduled for publication seems to have been, how shall we say, less than than generous in citing prior work stemming from a different discipline on essentially the same matter & in one case using essentially the same data.

Such practices are, of course, not entirely unknown and it should be said, are not unique to economics. Hype, over claiming, selectively citing to make work look more original than it is are pretty much standard operating procedure in many academic fields. As is the claim that everyone else is just doing correlations but with your cool IV you are doing causality.

An interesting take on this particular episode can be found here. What is amazing is  the fear & loathing that leads the authors to hide behind anonymity. I guess in some fields there are just a lot of big swinging dicks.