SEPTEMBER 2021
The recent retraction of an article at the Journal of Finance called on the Financial Intermediation Research Society (FIRS) to reiterate the principles that underlie its dedication to stimulate, promote, and disseminate quality academic research. We also acknowledge that one of the authors of the retracted paper, Professor Adriano Rampini, is a FIRS officer.
FIRS is committed to research integrity. The retraction in question demonstrates the importance to the discovery process of an active research community, transparency, and replication. Based on the information currently available to us, the post-publication process was followed and proved to be effective. Our understanding is that the authors provided both the code and data for public posting, thus allowing others to assess their work, and retracted the paper in light of inconsistencies in their results and the underlying data. We consider this to be the appropriate course of action and encourage all members of FIRS to support transparency in research.
We also emphasize that co-authorship entails some degree of joint responsibility for the integrity of a research manuscript. We encourage all members of FIRS to take this shared responsibility seriously. In this case, given the available information, we believe that Professor Rampini and his co-authors took the appropriate steps by retracting the paper in accordance with the guidelines set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).