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by GabrielF00 4809 days ago
This is an unsatisfying response. It doesn't answer the question of why Reinhart and Rogoff chose to exclude certain high-debt years for certain countries or why they chose the particular weighting mechanism that the critics found problematic.
3 comments

It is a response and that is all that is needed. The target audience for this just needed any rebuttal to paste into their streams to convince themselves that no adjustment of beliefs is required.
I agree. The damage is already done. It's going to take a response tenfold the magnitude of this publication to rebut it. Even then there's going to be people citing it.

All granted that it's true that RR was so far off to begin with.

While I agree that it doesn't seem to be an adequate response (the whole -0.1 to 2.2 difference looks problematic enough), they claim that their 2012 paper addresses the weighting mechanism.

So we'd need to read that paper too to then argue if it somewhat clarifies their findings.

It's unsatisfying because it's a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They didn't actually address the criticisms. It screams politics more than academics at this point.