Most Recently Published: Valon Kadriu’s Findings on “Novelty and Selective Reporting in Economics”

In his working paper published by the Institute for Replication (I4R), Valon Kadriu draws on findings from the academic literature regarding the prevalence of selective reporting (i.e., p-hacking and publication bias) in economics. Through his analysis of thousands of tests published in renowned economics journals, he aims to contribute to the academic literature by examining whether the degree of novelty “intensifies” these results.

Kadriu, Valon (2026): Novelty and Selective Reporting in Economics. Institute for Replication (I4R). s.l. (I4R Discussion Paper Series, 310). Online https://hdl.handle.net/10419/342980, checked on 8/24/2026.

Abstract:

The scientific community rewards priority: the researcher who establishes a novel finding first, claims credit that later entrants cannot. This reward may increase the incentive to reach statistical significance. Using 43,140 tests published in the American Economic Review (AER), Journal of Political Economy (JPE), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) between 2001 and 2010, together with text-based and bibliographic measures of novelty, I examine whether more novel articles are more prone to selective reporting. Running caliper regressions around conventional significance thresholds, I find suggestive evidence that novel articles are more likely to report just-significant results at the 10 percent level, an association concentrated around the threshold and driven by textual novelty.