Access
Despite my own preferences, my work often ends up behind a paywall.1 In this website I provide easy and free access to my work. For each research article, you should be able to find a link to the article as published by the journal (🔗) and a link to the article in PDF (📄).2 If the article is published under the open access model3, there might be only one link. If you cannot access any of the papers listed in my website, please send me an email.
Transparency
The production of knowledge in economics (and beyond) is an open conversation and everything in such production is up for debate. But it’s a lot harder to debate when one cannot see the full results, code, or data underlying the conclusion of a research article. My goal is to facilitate that debate, at least around my work.
When possible4, I include a link to a replication package (💾) that contains instructions to replicate the analyses, as well as data and code when possible. When I succeed in my quest for transparency, my work can be replicated with one click (provided you have the right software and basic folder structure). However, this is an ongoing effort that is better reflected in my ongoing research.
In addition to my efforts to make my own work transparent, I’ve also (recently) joined a few larger projects that aim to study generalizability and replicability of research in social sciences. I’ll add more information as these projects start to produce outcomes.
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A paywall is a method to restrict access to content. Unfortunately, most academic research is behind a paywall. (This documentary provides a quick description of the problem). That said, there are alternative ways to get access to work behind a paywall. One such alternative is the legal service Unpaywall or the amazing sci hub website. ↩
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I use SocArxiv to publish my work before submitting to a journal for publication (know as working paper or as a preprint). This is a service provided by the Center for Open Science and works better than any of the alternatives I have seen. One such alternatives, SSRN (which is owned by Elsevier) is particularly popular in economics. SocArxiv is better than the alternatives in every way and does not restrict access like SSRN does (see a comparison here). ↩
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In practice, Open Access (OA) in most journals means that the researchers (or more specifically, the funders of the study, usually tax payers) pay a large amount (often between $1000 and $3000) for the article to be “free” to readers. In general, I do not choose to pay for Open Access because, even if I had lots of funds, I can easily provide access to the content of my research with preprints. That said, some of my research is published under the OA model because the matter was not under my control. For example, due to agreements by the university or even at country level. I strongly believe that there are better ways to spend $1000 (or more). In any case, I often include a link to the preprint even when the article is published under the Open Access model, this is because I think the usual formatting in journal articles makes papers hard to read (e.g. with tiny fonts). ↩
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As much as I’d like to have easy replication packages for every article I have published, the truth is that the push for open science is fairly new and open science is still far from being the standard in economics (or any field). I began doing research (as a research assistant) back in 2012 and I (most likely) did things that are hard to reproduce. I might be able to go back and create replication packages for old research, but it’s certainly costly and there are no strong incentives. So there is a trade-off between spending my time going back to make old work easier to reproduce or spending my time moving forward. I’d like to believe that I’m a much better researcher now and that my time is better spent doing new research than polishing old research. My compromise is that my research going forward will be open science by default, but I’m open to help in the unlikely case people try to replicate (or reproduce) my earlier work. ↩