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Audit the replication packages of 4,452 published economics papers

Working with two economists, Schwartz's team built an 'AI data editor' with AI: it ported the replication packages of 4,452 papers from five leading journals out of MATLAB, Stata and other commercial tools into open-source code — some 30,000 routines — and checked essentially every verifiable number against the published tables. The work, normally a careful manual job for a journal editor, is written up in an NBER working paper.

How it works

  1. Collect the replication packages of 4,452 papers across five leading journals
  2. Port roughly 30,000 routines from MATLAB, Stata and other commercial software to open-source code
  3. Re-run the ported code
  4. Compare essentially every verifiable number against the published tables
  5. Write up the method and findings as an NBER working paper with two economist coauthors

Why it’s worth knowing

It re-ran the code behind 4,452 published papers and checked their numbers — verification at a scale no journal could staff by hand.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on anthropic.com. See the original ↗

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