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I was fortunate to be interviewed some months ago about my forthcoming book by Alex Hollingsworth (Indiana University) and Sebastian Tello-Trillo (University of Virginia) for their podcast, The Hidden Curriculum.

During our hour-long conversation, we also talked about music, my workflow, some of my recent research, and cookbooks. Listen below:

E57 Replication and transparency practices with Lars Vilhuber (AEA Data Editor) – The Hidden Curriculum

In this episode we talk with Lars Vilhuber about replication practices, transparency in economics, and data access. Lars is the Executive Director of the Labor Dynamics Institute at Cornell University, a Senior Research Associate in the Economics Department at Cornell, and the American Economic Association's Data Editor. His interests include labor economics, statistical disclosure limitation and data dissemination, and reproducibility and replicability in the social sciences. His current work includes TRACE (TRAnsparency CErtified), a project that gives researchers automated tools to credibly demonstrate that their code runs and produces the results they report.Sebastian Tello-Trillo is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.Alex Hollingsworth is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Ohio State University.Henry Morris is our main editor. He is a student at the University of Virginia studying computer science and mathematics.In this episode we discussed:How Lars became the AEA Data Editor, and the AEA session comment dismissing research based on proprietary data that pushed him toward reproducibility workWhat the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy requires, and why the AEA was not the first journal to run authors' codeHow the review process works: a team of a graduate student, a pre-doc, and 15–20 undergraduates runs replication packages, and how other journals structure the same taskTRACE: institution-run replication that produces a signed certificate showing the code ran and produced the stated outputs (it does not certify that the code is correct), including for restricted dataPractical tips for reproducible code: start early, use a master script, manage software and package versions, use assertions, and write the README as you goCommon reasons code fails to run, and what happens when results differ after fixesWhether reviewers should assess replicability, and why the data editor checks only whether the code runsLars's workflow: block scheduling on his calendar, firm work-life boundaries, and no fixed to-do system📚 Resources mentioned:Office of the AEA Data Editor, including its guidance, blog posts, and FAQsTRAnsparency CErtified (TRACE): Trusting Computational Research Without Repeating It — ZenodoJournal of Applied Econometrics Data Archive — the journal's replication repository, running since 1985Zenodo and Dataverse [link needed] — trusted repositories accepted under the AEA policy, including options for delayed publication"Pretest with Caution: Event-Study Estimates after Testing for Parallel Trends" by Jonathan Roth — American Economic Review: Insights (Lars's favorite paper in the lightning round)getcensus — Stata command to load American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau API🎮 Recommendations of the week:Lars's rec: Grilled lemongrass chicken with a clementine cake and chocolate ganache (New York Times recipe)Alex's rec: The musician Logan Hone, a flautist and multi-instrumentalistSebastian's rec: The AEA Data Editor's guidance and resources, and the getcensus command in Stata for importing ACS data (requires a Census API key)

1. E57 Replication and transparency practices with Lars Vilhuber (AEA Data Editor) 59:55
2. E56 – How to write a diversity statement with Patrick Button 01:03:01
3. E55 – What is Git, Github, and should I use it? With Andrea Moro 52:00
4. E54 -How to Negotiate with Matt Notowidigdo 01:02:15
5. E53 – How to work with large organization to implement research and policy with Mushfiq Mobarak 53:25

There is less than one month until my book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School–But Didn’t comes out on May 10.

One of the things that most people don’t realize about the book-publishing business is the importance of pre-orders, which act as an early signal of interest in a given book. If you are planning on buying the book, I would like to encourage you to pre-order it here, which will ensure that you receive the book on the day it is released (see the expected delivery date for my own pre-order below), and your credit card will not get charged until your copy of the book ships.

You have pre-ordered your own copy but know someone who is about to enter grad school to do quantitative social science, is already in grad school doing so, or is about to start a position doing so? This would make for a great gift for them.

Not the most elegant of titles, I realize, but that is nevertheless the title of a new working paper which Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar co-founder and co-organizer Jeff Bloem and I recently finished drafting. Here is the abstract:

In May 2020, in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we launched the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics (OARES) seminar in an effort to maintain a semblance of normalcy for scholars in the field of agricultural and applied economics. The goal of the OARES was to break down the privilege barrier in two ways: (i) by featuring for the most part research by junior, female, or minority scholars, and (ii) by bringing frontier research to those who may not have had access to a regular seminar series prior to the pandemic. Against those goals, we discuss the contribution of the OARES to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in agricultural and applied economics.

In the paper, we first analyze attendance data for 70 regular OARES presentations, finding that there is no apparent tradeoff between attendance on the one hand and the gender, race, or seniority of the speaker, and further finding that there is no relationship between attendance and a talk’s general topic area (i.e., development, environmental, or food and agricultural economics).

Second, we discuss where the 17 papers presented at OARES that are already published have been published, which includes top general journals (e.g., the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and the Review of Economics and Statistics), top field journals (e.g., the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Development Economics), as well as some general science journals (e.g., Environmental Research Letters and Nature Human Behavior).

Finally, we discuss some of the lessons learned from two years of the OARES. Those lessons are that (i) there is a demand for diversity, (ii) there is no trade-off between diversity and merit, (iii) people can and do adapt to new circumstances, (iv) research topic is unrelated to attendance, (v) attendance follows predictable seasonal patterns, (vi) the marginal benefit of organizing the OARES exceeds the marginal cost, and (vii) we can foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging by building community.

This is very much a first draft of this paper, and so we welcome comments and suggestions.