On the Chen and Kung 2019 QJE paper:
"This is extremely suspicious. Speculating, it looks like the authors had a nice paper using provincial data, but a referee asked them to extend it to prefecture leaders. To fit their story, they needed to find an effect of land sales for secretaries (but not mayors), and an effect of GDP growth for mayors (but not secretaries). But maybe the data didn’t agree, and their RA had to falsify the mayor promotion data to get the ‘correct’ result. This wouldn’t be easy for referees to spot, since the replication files didn’t include spell-level data. But how else did they collect such error-ridden data that also just happened to produce results consistent with their story?"
Source: https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications
James Kung: a serial data manipulator
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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. -
Chen Shuo got another top publication:
Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911. Conditionally Accepted by American Economic Review
https://www.yimingcao.com/research.htmlFor the love of Gawd. I have seen a related paper of theirs where they try to argue that the closure of the Grand Canal was exogenous and unexpected.
The dam thing was silting up for like a 100 years due to disuse. How do people get away with papers like this?
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Chen Shuo got another top publication:
Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911. Conditionally Accepted by American Economic Review
https://www.yimingcao.com/research.htmlFor the love of Gawd. I have seen a related paper of theirs where they try to argue that the closure of the Grand Canal was exogenous and unexpected.
The dam thing was silting up for like a 100 years due to disuse. How do people get away with papers like this?Yes, this paper is the one you mentioned. Surprised that AER accepts a paper like this...Who are the editor and the referees?
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Chen Shuo got another top publication:
Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911. Conditionally Accepted by American Economic Review
https://www.yimingcao.com/research.htmlFor the love of Gawd. I have seen a related paper of theirs where they try to argue that the closure of the Grand Canal was exogenous and unexpected.
The dam thing was silting up for like a 100 years due to disuse. How do people get away with papers like this?Yes, this paper is the one you mentioned. Surprised that AER accepts a paper like this...Who are the editor and the referees?
Duflo was the editor... What does she possibly know about Chinese history? She was also the one accepting the fraudulent "youth send down" paper by Li-An Zhou and coauthors.
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Chen Shuo got another top publication:
Rebel on the Grand Canal: Disrupted Trade Access and Social Conflict in China, 1650-1911. Conditionally Accepted by American Economic Review
https://www.yimingcao.com/research.html@ZhangTaisu: This is an interesting paper, and the basic conclusion that Qing grain tribute trade routes had a large effect on regional socioeconomic stability is probably correct. However, there’s one big oddity in the results, which is that its effects begin with the first sea-shipping experiment by the Qing Court in 1826, instead of the more permanent sea shipping reforms in the later 1840s. As anyone who knows this history can tell you, the 1826 experiment lasted for a grand total of 1 year, and canal shipping resumed at normal levels shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until two decades later that more systemic changes were put in place. So why would a 1 year experiment have such a large and durable effect on local stability? You might say that local populations could anticipate the 1840s reforms after 1826, but that seems highly unlikely given the Imperial Court’s rapid backtracking. So what was the casual mechanism in the 20 years in-between? The paper really needs an answer for this.