P-Hacking, Data Type and Data-Sharing Policy

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between p-hacking, publication bias, and data-sharing policies. We collect 38,876 test statistics from 1,106 articles published in leading economic journals between 2002–2020. We find that while data-sharing policies increase the provision of data, they do not decrease the extent of p-hacking and publication bias. Similarly, articles that use hard-to-access administrative data or third-party surveys, as compared to those that use easier-to-access (e.g., author-collected) data are not different in their p-hacking and publication extent. Voluntary provision of data by authors on their homepages offers no evidence of reduced p-hacking.