O Pior Pesadelo de um Pesquisador: O Erro de Reinhart e Rogoff

Errar é humano, mas errar numa publicação acadêmica pode destruir carreiras e reputações. Considerem o aparente cochilo lógico de dois grandes economistas Carmen Reinhart e Kenneth Rogoff: "An influential 2010 economics paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff showed that countries with high levels of debt experienced significantly slower rates of growth – and became a justification for many countries to adopt austerity budgets to hold down their debt loads. Now a provocative new paper is arguing that the paper was seriously flawed, in part because of basic calculation errors in a spreadsheet.(...) Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, decided to try to replicate the results. They could not do so with public data, and asked Mr. Rogoff and Ms. Reinhart for their data set. Within it, they have seemingly discovered a few errors: some simple miscalculations or data exclusions that greatly alter the results. According to their re-running of the figures, “the average real G.D.P. growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent,” they write".