RDP 2021-02: Star Wars at Central Banks 7. Conclusion

There are now many studies claiming to show that common research practices have been systematically producing misleading bodies of evidence. Several fields have been implicated, including finance and economics. To date, the claims have focused mainly on work published in peer-reviewed journals, with one of the alleged problems being researcher bias. There are now growing calls to adopt research practices that, while often resource intensive, better preserve research credibility.

We search for researcher bias in a different population of interest: central banks. Whereas Fabo et al (2020) do show evidence suggesting researcher bias in central bank assessments of quantitative easing, our focus on a broader body of central bank research produces results that are mixed. What's more, the part of our work that does suggest bias uses a method that we challenge. At this point, all that is clear from our work is that central banks produce results with patterns different from those in top economic journals; there is less bunching around the 5 per cent threshold of statistical significance. We offer some speculative explanations for the difference but ultimately leave it as a puzzle for future research to explain.