Oster (2008)

Incredibly impressive. A new NBER working paper by Emily Oster and Gang Chen entitled "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China" is just out. Emily, as you recall, had a 2005 paper that claimed to find the exact opposite, and it turned into a single-authored publication at the prestigious Journal of Political Economy. Now she finds the opposite. It's not so much impressive that she found the opposite, because so many people since then have been casting doubt on that hypothesis, but rather that she worked on it til and then produced scholarship finding it wasn't correct. I now have more even more respect for Emily Oster than ever before. I'm honestly not sure I could have done that, but now that she has done it, I will have her as a model in my mind. Tyler's right - this is truth seeking. I've spoken with Emily, and I remember her telling me very clearly in a conversation that what she believed economists should be doing and being about is the pursuit of truth. That was it. Not economic imperialism or fame, but simply testing hypotheses and finding answers. I now believe her.

Now I'm just waiting on Levitt to write, "Legalized abortion did not cause the fall in crime in the 1990s to have all of my faith restored.