[VHRanger]

My point is that it's very easy to check "model calibration" (eg. "Plug values from outside data"). Just run the code with different values.

Because it's so easy to check those things (assuming the data is not proprietary or whatnot) I'd argue it's a much lesser problem than the "garden of forking paths" in lab experiments where it's much harder to test robustness of the result.

Moreover, I don't think anyone intelligent is foolish enough to take the coefficients in an econometric study literally; at least I would hope not.