> Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:

> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”

I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.

Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.