An Influential Economics Forum Has a Troubling Surplus of Trolls

Now, it appeared, someone on EJMR was accusing Rossin-Slater and her co-author of plagiarism. The post was brief, linking to their paper and another study published in 2011 in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine. According to the anonymous poster, the two “have an almost identical dataset” and a “substantial portion of the AER paper is not even novel.” The writer accused Rossin-Slater of ripping off the earlier paper and assuming no one would notice. Another comment pointed to a 1978 study from Finland that looked at the impact of losing a father while in utero on the likelihood of later developing schizophrenia and other negative outcomes.