American Economic Association (AEA) Data & Code Repository at openICPSR

Abstract

In 2019, the American Economic Association (AEA) adopted a Data and Code Availability Policy “to improve the reproducibility and transparency of materials supporting research published in the AEA journals by providing improved guidance on the types of materials required, increased quality control, and more review earlier in the publication process.” The AEA initiative is one of the most comprehensive reproducibility and data/code sharing initiatives in the social sciences. In this presentation, we review the AEA workflow, including how the AEA assesses compliance with the policy and the accuracy of the information by running code to reproduce the reported results. We also demonstrate the newly established AEA Data and Code Repository at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which facilitates the AEA's workflow and review. Each data collection in the repository receives a persistent digital identifier (DOI), as well as descriptive metadata to increase findability, including JEL codes and subject terms. Data collections are also linked back to the journal article. Additionally, the AEA migrated their entire back archive of more than 3,000 data and code supplements to the AEA Data and Code Repository at ICPSR. This represents almost two decades of required data sharing associated with AEA journal publications.