reinhart_rogoff_coding_error_0

This is the coding mistake in Reinhart-Rogoff 2010 paper that was uncovered in 2013 by a student who finally obtained the original datasets. It’s easy to see the missing cells which include Belgium, a country with high debt and high growth.

Three years passed between the publication of the report and the uncovering of the mistakes. During this time, the report had been quoted extensively by scholars and politicians to justify austerity.

If releasing data were the default option in any such paper, such mistake would have been easily detected .