Problemas em outro artigo polêmico

No início do ano, publicamos um problema que ocorreu no principal periódico de contabilidade:

• Uma pesquisa sobre evasão fiscal foi publicada em 2017 no principal periódico de contabilidade do mundo, o The Accounting Review
• Um pesquisador, Alex Young, com dúvidas sobre a pesquisa, solicitou, sem sucesso, acesso aos dados e códigos usados, publicando suas dúvidas no EJW
• Agora, o The Accounting Review retirou o artigo de sua edição

Agora, o Retraction Watch informa que a mesma dupla também teve um artigo aprovado em outro periódico, The Review of Financial Studies, da Oxford University Press, com problemas. Segundo o periódico

A special committee appointed by the SFS investigated the paper “Do Institutional Investors Demand Public Disclosure,” by A. Bird and S. Karolyi, published in the Review of Financial Studies in 2016 (10.1093/rfs/hhw062, volume 29, 3245–3277), after receiving reports on the inconsistency in the paper’s use of Russell vs. CRSP market capitalization ranks between the published version of the paper and its previously publicly distributed working paper version. Using the data and code provided by the authors, the committee determined that the estimates based on the use of Russell vs. CRSP ranks were not substantially different from each other. However, the Committee discovered that equations (1) and (2) on page 3254, which describe the two-stage model, do not describe the actual regressions that were used to generate the results presented in the paper. Moreover, the committee found that the paper’s main inferences are not robust if the models are estimated as described on page 3254 of the paper. In summary, the Committee concluded that the methodology described in the paper does not generate the results reported in that paper. Futhermore, the Committee concluded that the actual specification the authors acknowledged to have used in the paper was econometrically inconsistent. This is because the missing term constitutes an “excluded variable” which was not justified by the setting or discussed in the paper. The authors’ misstatement prevented the issue from being discovered in the review process.

Ou seja, os autores usaram uma regressão para fazer os cálculos e apresentaram outra no trabalho. E que não existiria diferença estatística. Ou seja, há problemas econométricos.

O Retraction Watch questiona, no entanto, que o periódico permitiu que os autores fizessem um “correção” do artigo, quando deveria ter ocorrido uma “retratação”, como foi o caso do início do ano, no The Accounting Review.

Guarde os nomes dos autores: Bird e Karolyi. Evite citá-los.