Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but Not Practised

Data-sharing is an essential tool for replication, validation and extension of empirical results. Usinga hand-collected data set describing the data-sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected empiricalresearchers, we provide evidence that most researchers in economics and management do not sharetheir data voluntarily. We derive testable hypotheses based on the theoretical literature on information-sharing and relate data-sharing to observable characteristics of researchers. We find empirical supportfor the hypotheses that voluntary data-sharing significantly increases with (a) academic tenure, (b) thequality of researchers, (c) the share of published articles subject to a mandatory data-disclosure policyof journals, and (d) personal attitudes towards “open science” principles. On the basis of our empiricalevidence, we discuss a set of policy recommendations