About the Journal
The Journal of Comments and Replication in Economics (JCRE) replaces the previous International Journal for Re-Views in Empirical Economics (IREE). JCRE remains the premier journal for publishing replication studies and also publishes commentaries on original studies in Economics.
For more detailed information on JCRE, visit our journal website.
Current Issue
Vol. 4 No. 9 (2025): The Common Problem of Bad Controls in Tests of the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis. A Comment on Ayres et al. (PNAS, 2023) and related literature
Languages encode the future differently, such that languages can be sorted into different types. When
making future predictions, Strong Future Time Reference (FTR) languages often require marking
future-time, whereas weak FTR languages do not. The Linguistic Savings Hypothesis predicts this
difference will affect people’s patience, perhaps because weak FTR languages make the future feel
closer. Three recent articles have reported significant effects on individual patience as well as
firm-level income smoothing and investment efficiency. However each paper includes controls which
increase bias, rather than reduce it. Due to data sharing limitations, I can only publish a reanalysis in
one case; fixing the problem leaves smaller and non-significant effects. This problem does not affect
all research on the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis, but the effects are not as large or widespread as
previously reported.
Published:
2025-12-29
