Last spring, graduate student Thomas Herndon found glaring errors in a widely cited academic paper by two Harvard professors. Harmlessly, he worked to identify these errors for his applied econometrics class at UMass, and upon reaching the conclusion that some of the data was inaccurate, he went public with his discoveries. The power of social media made his findings go viral, and the rest was history. Find out what Thomas has to say about his personal interests and research below!
How did you first become interested in economics?
I’ve always kind of been interested in economics. Namely economic policies, and the economy, and money in general, jobs—they affect folks quite a bit. I probably decided I wanted to be a professional economist a little bit later. It was at Evergreen [State College] I went into econ. They gave us a lot of freedom. I had studied a lot of history and political economy issues, and decided I wanted to be an economist as an undergrad. So I did all the stuff you needed to do! I knew I wanted to come to UMass because they have a really awesome department for the type of stuff I wanted to study… like political economy. So I came here!
What field/subtopics within economics most interests you?
Basically my work focuses around political economy and empirical macro issues—especially topics on the financial system and financial institutions. I study a lot of the history of those—how they affect stability and regulation issues as well.
How did you stumble upon the error that has resulted in so much fame?
That’s a long story. So the paper began as a term paper last fall in my applied econometrics class. We just had to replicate a paper. I chose [Rogoff and Reinhart’s] paper, and I kind of used [it] as an example of a paper that just used basic statistics to communicate a really big point in a way that a wide audience could hear. The problem is I just didn’t buy their point. I looked at the paper and didn’t think it was very plausible for a number of reasons, and so I decided to look into it. By the end of fall semester—by the time I’d written my term paper—we were all pretty sure something had gone wrong but we weren’t exactly sure what. During the spring semester I was turning the paper—you know just developing it, rewriting and editing it, so that it was of publishable quality. And I was trying to contact them just letting them know exactly what problems I was having—asking if I could see their data—so that I could just make sure I didn’t make any mistakes. They had posted some of the data for it online but they never really posted their working spreadsheet which showed how all the data fit together and what calculations they had actually made. After a couple of follow up emails I finally heard back from them in April and they sent me the working spreadsheet. From there it was pretty easy to find the errors in it because I was pretty familiar with the data already and I had questions about it—how did they construct the negative average? I had been trying all semester and was unable to. So I just immediately looked at that, and the errors were very obvious, all on the summary page.
How did your discovery go viral?
Basically we published it on a Monday, and someone wrote a brief summary of it at a blog that my consul runs. He wrote a brief summary of it and put it online, and Dean Baker also wrote a piece about it—one of our friends at the center for economic policy research in DC. So they both wrote blog posts about it and almost immediately Twitter started blowing up once they wrote their post on Tuesday around noon. It was really making its rounds on the Internet and we did one interview too, with the news network just to try to get the message out. By the end of the day more or less, everyone was trying to contact us—at least all the U.S. media was. The next day it hit Europe and then the European media tried to contact us. We didn’t expect any of this at all; like I wasn’t prepared; I didn’t even have a headshot or a sports coat that fit me well! All those basic things I didn’t have. I wasn’t ready at all but got ready pretty quick.
How did you go about going public with your discoveries in the paper?
When I heard back from them in the email, Carmen Reinhart kind of told us that she hadn’t had time to look into the problems that we had emailed her about and really wouldn’t have any time to engage with my paper at all because of her obligations to her students. She was the only one who responded—but she said yeah of course, here’s the data. I could look at [the data] myself and [was] free to publish whatever I wanted. When we went public we didn’t really have any real media strategy or anything like that—we just kind of posted it as a working paper and emailed a couple friends who wrote the initial blog post about it. We figured we’d have a couple blog posts, and once it happened it just blew up from there. Then basically the next two-three weeks were just all interviews from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. The world’s media was contacting us; we didn’t go out there and try to pitch anyone.
What was it like being on the Colbert report?
I was a little nervous! But they did a really good job helping me feel comfortable and I had a really good time. They definitely did a good job helping me feel comfortable.
How has this discovery impacted your life the most?
I got to meet a lot of cool people…and a lot of folks whose work I respected for a long time have gotten to see my work—definitely one of the things that I’m really happy about. Having folks in the profession see and talk about it a lot was incredible; I was really honored to contribute to that.
Do you think this discovery will help you with your future career goals?
I mean yeah, hopefully! On the one hand I’m sure it does help on some level, then again it’s such a polarizing debate I’m sure it didn’t make everybody happy. Who knows! On net, I’m sure it will help getting my name out there. Certainly the different talks I’ve been invited to are all really interesting. I definitely think on net it’s been a positive [impact on my life].
Do you have any tips or pieces of advice for aspiring economists?
Question everything and work hard.
And there you have it! Words of wisdom from one of the talented graduate students at UMass. It was a pleasure being able to speak with someone so well-versed on the fundamentals of economics, and hope for all the best in his future endeavors as a professional economist. Look out for Thomas around campus!