Used by

The papers collected here have been cited more than 10,000 times on Google Scholar’s count. They and the data behind them have been used in academic research, in policy analysis at national and international institutions, in central bank publications, and in teaching. Selected examples follow, with links to the documents.

Independent use of the data

Slichter and Tran use eleven datasets from this site in a study of whether prestigious journals publish more accurate estimates. Those eleven supply 502 of the 871 primary studies in their 24-literature sample. They find almost no relationship between journal rank and accuracy: the chance that an estimate from a top journal is closer to the truth than one from a mid-ranked journal is about 51%. The paper is accepted at the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics; the current version is IZA Discussion Paper 17960. Neither author has any connection to this project.

Academic use

The papers are cited for different reasons: a benchmark value, a bias-corrected estimate, evidence on why estimates differ from study to study, or a method for detecting publication bias. Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski cite the cross-country meta-analysis of intertemporal substitution in Dynamic Programming (Cambridge University Press) for “0.5 as a plausible average value for international studies, with rich countries tending slightly higher”. Simon Johnson, Lukasz Rachel, and Catherine Wolfram calibrate to the same literature in A Theory of Price Caps on Nonrenewable Resources, American Economic Review 116(7): 2711-2753, calling it “the mean value in the influential meta-study of Havranek, Horvath, Irsova, and Rusnak (2015)”. Both take the average of published estimates. Others need the average corrected for selective reporting. Michael Best, James Cloyne, Ethan Ilzetzki, and Henrik Kleven, estimating the same elasticity from mortgage notches in the Review of Economic Studies, take it from the companion paper, which “conducts a meta analysis of the existing literature and finds estimates centered around 0.3-0.4, after controlling for publication bias”.

Tomohiro Hirano and Joseph Stiglitz cite that paper, the companion paper, and the capital-labor substitution meta-analysis in Overlapping generations models, multiplicity of steady states and momentary equilibria, and economic fluctuations, Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Michael Kremer, Gautam Rao, and Frank Schilbach cite the publication-bias paper in Behavioral development economics, Handbook of Behavioral Economics. David Card, Jochen Kluve, and Andrea Weber cite it in their own meta-analysis of active labor market programs in the Journal of the European Economic Association, as a contrast to the funnel asymmetry they do not find; Card’s Berkeley graduate course reproduced its funnel plot in its 2016 lecture on intertemporal labor supply, Lecture 5 of Economics 250A. Five of these authors are Nobel laureates: Sargent, Johnson, Stiglitz, Kremer, and Card.

Eric Leeper, Nora Traum, and Todd Walker check their own estimates against the habit-formation meta-analysis in Clearing Up the Fiscal Multiplier Morass, also in the American Economic Review: their habit parameters are high, but “within the 90 percent bands for external habits that Havranek, Rusnak, and Sokolova’s (2017) meta study reports”. Diego Comin, Danial Lashkari, and Marti Mestieri calibrate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution to 0.5 in Econometrica, citing the same paper. Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Isabela Manelici, and Jose Vasquez cite the vertical spillovers meta-analysis in The Effects of Joining Multinational Supply Chains, Quarterly Journal of Economics, on why estimated spillovers vary so widely.

The work is cited outside economics as well. Science cites the gasoline price elasticity in Tracking the global footprint of fisheries, as one of the comparisons for the fuel price elasticity it estimates for the world fishing fleet. PNAS cites the social cost of carbon meta-analysis in a synthesis of what that cost is, the publication-bias paper in Declining CO₂ price paths, and the borders meta-analysis in a study of how legible international borders are. Other papers here are cited in Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Nature Communications, Nature Water, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Psychology. In Nature Ecology & Evolution, a paper on exaggeration bias and selective reporting in ecology cites the resource curse meta-analysis as a precedent for the diagnosis.

In policy institutions

SAGE, the computable general equilibrium model the US Environmental Protection Agency uses to analyse regulation, fixes the elasticity of intertemporal substitution from the cross-country meta-analysis: “in a recent review of over 1,400 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution for the United States, Havranek et al. (2015) find a mean value of 0.6. Based on this evidence, we set the value of η to 1.66” (SAGE Model Documentation 2.1.1, 2024).

The Congressional Research Service uses the corrected figure rather than the average. Reviewing whether tax policy can raise saving, it reports the meta-analytic mean of 0.6 for the United States, then: “Havranek, a coauthor of this meta-analysis, subsequently published the basic (worldwide) results after correcting for estimated publication bias. The correction indicates that the elasticity for macro aggregate studies is zero. In the basic case the elasticity for micro studies was 0.2. This study suggests that an elasticity of zero to 0.2 might be in order” (Can Tax Policy Increase Saving?, 2024). Its review of the models used for dynamic scoring does the same for the Frisch elasticity of labor supply, reporting the uncorrected 0.5 and then the zero that survives correction for publication bias and identification (Dynamic Scoring for Tax Legislation, 2025).

The Congressional Research Service has cited the daylight saving meta-analysis in the report it prepares for the US Congress in every version since 2018, most recently the July 2026 update. The European Parliamentary Research Service used the same paper in the ex-post impact assessment of the EU summer-time directive written for the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, calling it “a seemingly methodologically sound literature review of the available research”.

The flagship reports use the results too. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook of April 2023 builds its box on the speed of monetary transmission around the meta-analysis of transmission lags, whose estimates are the source of one of its figures: “a meta-analysis of 67 published studies covering 30 different economies (Havranek and Rusnak 2013) finds that the effect of a tightening on prices takes an average of about three years to reach its trough”. The Bank of England cites the same paper in its Monetary Policy Report of May 2024. The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor of April 2016 cites the horizontal spillovers meta-analysis on where productivity spillovers from foreign investment actually appear, and the World Bank’s Making Global Value Chains Work for Development returns to the vertical spillovers meta-analysis in four separate chapters. The European Commission’s review of structural reforms in Spain summarises the borders meta-analysis in detail, down to the 33% mean reduction in international trade it reports. The BIS Annual Economic Report 2024, on central bank financial results, cites Hampl and Havranek’s review of central bank financial strength and inflation for finding “no systematic evidence that central bank financial strength affects inflation outcomes”.

Each entry below is one document, published by the institution named, that cites a paper from this site.

• UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2013, the UN’s annual report on foreign investment, citing the vertical spillovers meta-analysis.
• World Trade Organization, Global Value Chain Development Report 2025, on FDI and value chain integration, and the 2021 edition before it.
• Asian Development Bank, an ADB Institute working paper on remittances and growth in Nepal, citing the remittances meta-analysis.
• Inter-American Development Bank, Boosting Foreign Direct Investment through Strategic Reforms: “Havranek and Irsova (2011) covering 47 countries and 57 studies find robust evidence that upstream vertical effects are positive and significant.”
• European Stability Mechanism, a working paper on Greece’s recovery plan, which sets risk aversion to match the elasticity of intertemporal substitution estimated for Greece, and the EBRD, a working paper on foreign investment and Romanian exporters.
• CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a background document for its advice on pensions and low returns, which sets the elasticity of intertemporal substitution to 0.5, “the mean of the values estimated in the literature”.
• The Treasury of New Zealand, International Investment for Growth, citing the horizontal spillovers meta-analysis.
• Institute for Fiscal Studies, a working paper on the gender wage gap, which uses the skill substitution meta-analysis to describe what the literature estimates and how.
• DIW Berlin, its report on carbon pricing in heating and transport, which tabulates the gasoline price elasticity from this site among the estimates it works from.
• Bruegel, a working paper on knowledge spillovers and geopolitical risk in supply chains, citing both FDI meta-analyses.

Some institutional reviews follow the methods rather than the results. The IMF, reviewing macroprudential policy across more than 6,000 estimates, builds its search that way and cites four of these papers: “the paper selection approach is similar to Havranek and Sokolova (2020) and Havranek and Irsova (2011)” (IMF Working Paper 20/67). A World Bank policy research working paper on agglomeration economies runs its publication-bias tests “following Havranek, 2015” and averages models the way the habit-formation meta-analysis does (Policy Research Working Paper 9730). A European Commission Joint Research Centre report on what closing schools during Covid did to student performance dates its studies the way the borders meta-analysis does (JRC134506). The OECD’s 2025 review of what climate policies do to emissions lists the gasoline meta-analysis among the syntheses of how fuel use responds to fuel prices (IFCMA Papers), and OECD authors cite both spillovers meta-analyses in the International Productivity Monitor.

Central banks

John Williams, then President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cited the meta-analysis of transmission lags in nine speeches in 2015 and 2016, always on the same point: “Milton Friedman famously taught us that monetary policy has long and variable lags. Research shows it takes at least a year or two for it to have its full effect” (Dancing Days Are Here Again, 2015, is one of them). Mary Daly, his successor, has cited it in three more, most recently at the European Banking Congress in 2023.

Each entry below is one document published by the bank named.

• European Central Bank, Monetary policy transmission: a reference guide through ESCB models and empirical benchmarks, Occasional Paper 377, which cites the meta-analysis of transmission lags, the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and the forward premium puzzle: “according to a meta-analysis conducted by Havranek and Rusnak (2013), researchers who use monthly instead of quarterly data systematically report a faster MP transmission.”
• Bank for International Settlements, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s literature review on financial technology and competition for banking services, on bank competition and financial stability: “as pointed out in a meta-analysis by Zigraiova and Havranek (2016), there is no general consensus”. A BIS working paper cites the finance and growth meta-analysis.
• Federal Reserve Board, Modeling the Consumption Response to the CARES Act, on habit formation in consumption.
• Bank of England, a staff working paper on bank competition and risk in the United Kingdom: “Zigraiova and Havranek (2016) use meta-data analysis to examine almost 600 empirical estimates from 31 studies of the competition-stability link and find no definitive systematic evidence.”
• Swiss National Bank, a working paper on the interest rate sensitivity of house prices, which benchmarks its result against the house price meta-analysis: “the existing literature, which, according to a meta-study by Ehrenbergerova et al. (2022), suggests an average peak decline of 1.2% after just two years.”
• Reserve Bank of Australia, Anticipatory Monetary Policy and the ‘Price Puzzle’, on the price puzzle meta-analysis: “in a survey of 70 studies using VARs spanning 31 countries, Rusnak, Havranek and Horvath (2013) found that half showed a price puzzle.”
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Subjective Intertemporal Substitution: “a recent meta study by Havranek (2015) based on 2,735 estimates from 169 published papers reports a distribution of estimates that ranges from -5 to 5.”
• And De Nederlandsche Bank, Norges Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, Banco de España, Sveriges Riksbank, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Japan, the Central Bank of Ireland, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the National Bank of Belgium, the Bank of Greece, Eesti Pank, the Bank of Israel, and the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, and Cleveland.

From 2015 to 2019 Havranek was full-time Advisor to the Board of the Czech National Bank, and the opinions he wrote for the Board argue from meta-analytic averages. The opinion on Situation Report 6/2017 makes the case for a steeper path of rate increases partly on the ground that “the average of published estimates of transmission in the Czech Republic suggests that a change in rates has its greatest effect on prices after 15 months”, citing the meta-analysis of transmission lags. The Bank has since released those opinions, and they are here in English translation beside the Czech originals it published: 2/2016, 6/2016, 6/2017, and 8/2018.

Teaching and software

Havranek taught research synthesis at the University of Canterbury as an Erskine Fellow in 2025, gave a lecture course on meta-analysis at the University of Osaka in 2026, and taught a two-day course for policy economists at the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis in Stockholm in August 2025 (programme). The written form of the same material is the practitioner’s guide and the MAER-Net reporting guidelines. MAIVE, the estimator that reduces the bias arising when reported precision is spurious, is on CRAN and runs in a browser at EasyMeta.org.

Tomas Havranek and Zuzana Irsova maintain the site at the Institute of Economic Studies, Charles University, Prague. Corrections are welcome: tomas.havranek@fsv.cuni.cz.