In March 2018, the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) began piloting Pre-results Review track (also referred to as “registered reports” in other disciplines) in collaboration with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Through this track, the JDE reviewed and accepted detailed proposals for prospective empirical projects before results were available, offering a commitment to publish the resulting papers regardless of their findings.

The motivation behind this exercise was simple: both science and policy should reward projects that ask important questions and employ sound methodology, irrespective of what the results happen to be. By shifting the bulk…