A Practical Guide to Registered Reports for Economists

Journal of the Economic Science Association, forthcoming

60 Pages Posted: 2 Jun 2022 Last revised: 13 Dec 2022

See all articles by Thibaut Arpinon

Thibaut Arpinon

Georg-August University Göttingen; Université de Rennes 1 - Université Rennes 1

Romain Espinosa

CIRED, International Research Center on Environment & Development, France

Date Written: December 7, 2022

Abstract

The current publication system in economics has encouraged the inflation of positive results in empirical papers. Registered Reports, also called Pre-Results Reviews, are a new submission format for empirical work that take pre-registration one step further. In Registered Reports, researchers write their paper before running the study and commit to a detailed data collec- tion process and analysis plan. After a first-stage review, a journal can give an In-Principle- Acceptance guaranteeing that the paper will be published if the authors carry out their data collection and analysis as pre-specified. We here propose a practical guide to Registered Reports for empirical economists. We illustrate the major problems that Registered Reports address (p- hacking, HARKing, forking, and publication bias), and present practical guidelines on how to write and review Registered Reports (e.g., the data-analysis plan, power analysis, and correction for multiple-hypothesis testing), with R and STATA codes. We provide specific examples for experimental economics, and show how research design can be improved to maximize statisti- cal power. Last, we discuss some tools that authors, editors and referees can use to evaluate Registered Reports (checklist, study-design table, and quality assessment).

Keywords: registered reports, practical guide, pre-registration, p-hacking, HARKing, multiple-hypothesis testing, power analysis, smallest effect size of interest

JEL Classification: A10, C12, C9

Suggested Citation

Arpinon, Thibaut and Espinosa, Romain, A Practical Guide to Registered Reports for Economists (December 7, 2022). Journal of the Economic Science Association, forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4110803 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4110803

Thibaut Arpinon

Georg-August University Göttingen ( email )

Platz der Göttinger Sieben 5
Göttingen
Germany

Université de Rennes 1 - Université Rennes 1 ( email )

11 rue Jean Macé
CS 70803
Rennes, 35708
France

Romain Espinosa (Contact Author)

CIRED, International Research Center on Environment & Development, France ( email )

Campus du Jardin Tropical
45 bis avenue de la Belle Gabrielle
F94736 Nogent sur Marne Cedex
France

HOME PAGE: http://romainespinosa.com

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