Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff

We replicate Reinhart and Rogoff (2010A and 2010B) and find that selective exclusion of available data, coding errors and inappropriate weighting of summary statistics lead to serious miscalculations that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies. Over 1946–2009, countries with public debt/GDP ratios above 90% averaged 2.2% real annual GDP growth, not −0.1% as published. The published...