Ethics and Disclosure Policy

Code of Conduct for Researchers

The Centre’s code of conduct addresses issues of ethics and disclosure of interests.  A pdf copy of the code and declaration form can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

Ethics

The treatment of ethical issues in the code of conduct draws on current Research Councils UK's 'Policy and Guidelines on Governance of Good Research Conduct' .

These are based on six key principles of ethical research that should be addressed whenever applicable:

1. Research should aim to maximise benefit for individuals and society and minimise risk and harm
2. The rights and dignity of individuals and groups should be respected
3. Wherever possible, participation should be voluntary and appropriately informed
4. Research should be conducted with integrity and transparency
5. Lines of responsibility and accountability should be clearly defined
6. Independence of research should be maintained and where conflicts of interest cannot be avoided they should be made explicit.

Eight practices should be adopted to implement these principles:

1. The responsibility for conduct of the research in line with relevant principles rests with the principal investigator and the research / employing organisation.
2. The responsibility for ensuring that research is subject to appropriate ethics review, approval and monitoring lies with the researcher or research organisation seeking or holding an award with CEPR and which employs the researchers performing it, or some of the researchers when it is acting as the co-ordinator for collaborative research involving more than one organisation.
3. Research organisations should have clear, transparent, appropriate and effective procedures in place for ethics review, approval and governance whenever it is necessary.
4. Risks should be minimised.
5. Research should be designed in a way that the dignity and autonomy of research participants is protected and respected at all times.
6. Research should be designed in such a way that research participants are at no stage harmed.
7. Ethics reviews should always be proportionate to the potential risk, whether this involves primary or secondary data.
8. Whilst the secondary use of some datasets may be relatively uncontroversial, and require only light touch ethics review, novel use of existing data and especially data linkage, as well as some uses of administrative and secure data will raise issues of ethics. Research involving primary data collection will always raise issues of ethics that must be addressed.

Conflicts of Interest and Disclosure

Please refer to the Centre's separate policy on 'Conflict of interest for affiliated researchers' for further information.

The Centre’s policy on Disclosure is modelled after that of the National Bureau of Economic Research. It also requires disclosure of funding sources as well as any “material and relevant” outside financial activities that bear on a given research paper:

1. The source of funding for the research must be acknowledged at the start of the research paper.
2. Researchers must disclose any relevant and material financial relationships that bear on their research. These include employment, consulting, or ownership relationships with firms that might be substantially affected by the research. One reasonable guideline is that a relationship is material if its value exceeds €10,000 per year. Required disclosures are author and project-specific: a given researcher may have relationships that are relevant for one research project but not another. The disclosure requirement applies to relationships that have been active in the last three years. Financial relationships of spouses and partners are also subject to disclosure.
3.  All co-authors of papers distributed through CEPR, not just CEPR affiliated co-authors, are subject to the disclosure policy.