Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/46356 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 3246
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present article argues that this is good advice in some research areas but not in others. Taking all issues which have appeared so far of the German Economic Review and a recent epidemiological meta-analysis as examples, it shows that there has indeed been a lot of misleading work in the context of significance testing, and that at the same time many promising avenues for fruitfully employing statistical significance tests, disregarded by Ziliak and McCloskey, have not been used.
Subjects: 
significance testing
JEL: 
A00
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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