Is There a False Positive in a Small Sample?

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There's a continuum of different fields and different priors. How many out of 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 hypotheses are likely to be hiding something that is genuinely non-null? I think that economics is mostly operating in, let's say, middle ground, but there's a lot of variability.

John Ioannidis of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his research on the reliability of published research findings. They discuss Ioannidis's recent study on bias in economics research, meta-analysis, the challenge of small sample analysis, and the reliability of statistical significance as a measure of success in empirical research.