BootstrapCensus

This repository contains data from a census of papers published in the American Economic Review in 2021 that use a bootstrap, as described in Andrews and Shapiro (2025b).

For each paper, the directory output/derived includes two CSV files (and their corresponding log files with summary statistics):

• NAME_Estimates.csv contains the authors' original point estimates, bootstrap standard errors and (where reported) confidence intervals for selected objects of interest
• NAME_Replicates.csv contains the bootstrap replicates for each object of interest

Repository Structure

• datastore/raw: original information (bootstrap replicates, replication archives, and correspondence) for each paper in census
• source/
  • raw/: metadata on papers and their objects of interest
  • derived/: code for each paper
• output/: estimates and replicates for each paper's objects of interest

The structure and requirements of the repository follow JMSLab/Template. If you wish to run the code in the repository, please see the documentation there.

Citations

If using the census in published work, please cite the following:

• Andrews, Isaiah, and Jesse M. Shapiro. 2025a. "BootstrapCensus". Code and data repository at https://github.com/JMSLab/BootstrapCensus.
• Andrews, Isaiah, and Jesse M. Shapiro. 2025b. “Communicating Scientific Uncertainty via Approximate Posteriors.” NBER Working Paper Series No. 32038. https://doi.org/10.3386/w32038.

Acknowledgments

We thank our dedicated research assistants for contributions to this project.