Economists from FSV UK have published a study in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals
Economists Zuzana Havránková and Tomáš Havránek from the Institute of Economic Studies at FSV UK have achieved a remarkable scientific success. Together with international colleagues, they published an article in Nature Communications, which according to several rankings belongs among the five most prestigious scientific journals in the world. The study introduces a new meta-analysis method designed for the social sciences.
Meta-analysis is a research technique that synthesizes the results of a large number of studies and helps draw more general conclusions. However, existing methods were primarily developed for medical experiments, whereas researchers in the social sciences typically work with observational data—that is, observing real-world situations without controlled laboratory experiments.
The team led by Professor Zuzana Havránková therefore developed the MAIVE method, which is better suited to the conditions of observational research. MAIVE uses sample size as a more reliable basis for estimating precision and can also detect and correct so-called p-hacking—situations in which researchers, consciously or unconsciously, steer their analyses toward intuitive and statistically significant results. “The publication of this article is an encouragement for our future work and for collaboration with international colleagues,” commented Professor Tomáš Havránek.
The new method already has practical applications. The authors have used it, for example, to examine the impact of class size on children’s education and the effects of financial incentives on performance. The results of these studies have been accepted for publication in prestigious economics journals such as the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics. The new MAIVE method is also freely available through the web application EasyMeta.org.
The publication in Nature Communications is the culmination of five years of research and also the main theme of the Junior Star grant from the Czech Science Foundation, led by Professor Havránková.
This year, Professor Havránková was also recognized in Forbes magazine’s Top Women in Science ranking.
Congratulations on this achievement!
