Is the article getting retracted?
James Kung: a serial data manipulator
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Chen Shuo is a golden fabricator. Just check his papers. He can fake anything from data, code to background context without any shame.
And he can even show off with all these "little tricks"...
A lot of unknowing PhD students were impressed by how smart he sounded on his Wechat articles.
He is just smart in the aspect of playing tricks. Besides the fabrication things, he is good at combining other people's resources and claiming them as his own.
Good observation
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Chen, Shuo and Yiming Cao. Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911 . revise and resubmit, American Economic Review
who in gods name is signing off on this s***?
Most of the "historical" stuff in the Top 5 is awful. Lots of it is, like Voth, dishonest.
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Chen, Shuo and Yiming Cao. Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911 . revise and resubmit, American Economic Review
who in gods name is signing off on this s***?
Most of the "historical" stuff in the Top 5 is awful. Lots of it is, like Voth, dishonest.
I think you're in the wrong thread
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For the QJE paper, Michael Wiebe obtained the original data from Kung, and found severe mistakes in the data that happen to generate the perfect results he needed. Just read Wiebe's blog and dissertation (link provided by OP).
For the APSR paper, in 2016 the data and code were shortly publicized, and some grad student easily spotted many many critical errors, including not using FE for the most important result. He wrote about this on his wechat official account back then: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI2ODA5MDg1MQ==&mid=2652448982&idx=1&sn=1ca3285cd87676fa58f316a0bb3a6d1d&chksm=f119645ac66eed4c5befe4d2ad217cdce93604fdcc36de07fe318188eda5dbd6e3387c3a9b66&sessionid=0&scene=126&clicktime=1625494168&enterid=1625494168&ascene=3&devicetype=android-29&version=28000653&nettype=WIFI&abtest_cookie=AAACAA%3D%3D&lang=zh_CN&exportkey=Aa8jFhjeJJgWs7IU3ldUyO8%3D&pass_ticket=ivdKqZ8Z38AsFwdSVl93OknkDBYqou8JnzLL%2BwCnwKe3dcUjAO62r59IIaBdv%2FHU&wx_header=1non-replicable due to p-hacking is one thing, it is certainly bad.
but in the cases that i listed, kung blatantly manipulated the datasets and misreported the results. such behaviors are inexcusable and orders of magnitudes worse than typical p-hacking.Many other papers by authors with china/hk affiliation cannot be replicated.
How do you know this? Did you run the data yourself?
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His APSR paper misreported the main regression, where he claimed to have included fixed effects, but did not. Running the regression as reported completely kills his findings. Moreover, other scholars have uncovered serious issues in Kung's dataset: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13603116.2014.882560
His QJE paper, again, completely manipulated the politician promotion data. Once these obvious data errors are fixed, the corresponding findings completely go away: https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications
And for most of his other economic history papers, he never shares his datasets, keeps asking for exemptions from the journal data policies despite the fact that his datasets are digitized from historical sources and are not even proprietary. When people email him asking for datasets for replication purposes, he keeps coming up with excuses not to share. Very suspicious.
People like these are the reason why no one trusts empirical works anymore.