Replication Policy

Quantitative Economics has the policy that all empirical, experimental and simulation results must be replicable. A condition for publication in the journal is that authors must submit data sets, programs, and information on empirical analysis, experiments and simulations that are needed for replication and some limited sensitivity analysis. Authors are encouraged to provide this material early in the review process to assist the referees and editors in evaluating the work, and in any case are required to submit this material before final acceptance of the paper can be given.

The following items need to be provided.

• A ReadMe.txt file which includes the following information about each program:

  • the software under which it is run, including the version of the software and any packages needed to run the code

  • the length of time the program required for execution on the authors’ hardware

  • where the output of the program appears in the paper

• All codes that are needed to obtain the results, as referenced in the ReadMe.txt file

• Files containing the data used by the authors including the following:

  • the data as originally downloaded by the authors including the date at which the data was originally downloaded

  • transformed versions of the data as may have been used prior to additional analysis by the authors together with sample construction code

  • the data files should be in plain ASCII format, for example, comma separated value (csv) format, that can be read by any researcher on any machine

  • in addition the authors may want to submit data in the form it was read by some of the programs, for example as Matlab *.mat files or Stata *.dta files, but simple ASCII data files must also be provided in every case

• If programs require very long times to run, please include summary output files containing the numbers created by the analysis that other readers could use to re-create the authors’ figures, tables, or later-stage analysis.

• Authors of experimental papers should consult the more detailed posted information regarding submission of experimental papers.

Requests for an exemption from providing the materials described here, or for restricting their usage, should be stated clearly when the paper is first submitted for review. It will be at the editors’ discretion whether the paper can then be reviewed. Exceptions will not be considered later in the review and publication process.

This material will be made available through the Quantitative Economics web page as supplementary material. Submitting this material indicates that you license users to download, copy, and modify it; when doing so such users must acknowledge all authors as the original creators and Quantitative Economics as the original publishers. In practice, this would mean that anyone using the material held within the replication package zip must (i) cite the paper (ii) cite the replication package, both in the manuscript and in the README of the replication package (iii) include a Data Availability statement in package to explain how data was obtained (and give proper attribution) and (iv) include the data files themselves in the package.

The editors understand that there may be some practical difficulties, such as in the case of proprietary datasets with limited access as well as public use data sets that require consent forms to be signed before use. In these cases detailed data description and the programs of the data so that researchers who do obtain access may be able to replicate the results, and bullet point 4 above about providing summary data files is particularly essential. This exemption is offered on the understanding that the authors made reasonable effort to obtain permission to make available the final data used in estimation, but were not granted permission. We also understand that in some particularly complicated cases programs may have value in themselves and the authors may not make them public. Similarly, there may be compelling reasons to restrict usage, and if we agree we will post a notice on the website regarding such restrictions.