Seminal papers that later were proven to contain errors?

Question

I was reading on institutions, and I came across Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR) paper on [The Colonial Origins of comparative development: An Empirical Investigation](http://economics.mit.edu/files/4123), and this paper seemed so 'perfect' that spawned a lot of other papers based on the data of ancient settler mortality rate and how it was used by AJR as an IV for the current quality of Institutions in former colonies. However, as I began searching more on this paper, I found out that the paper is in fact ridden with errors, specially on data treatment. ([Albouy's 2012](http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.snyder/albouy.pdf) comment on the same paper, published by The American Economic Review)I would like to know, if, besides this paper on development economics, are there any other seminal papers, in any area of economics, that later on were proven to have crucial mistakes/errors that invalidated the paper conclusions?

Answer 1

The most famous must be the publication of Reinhart and Rogoff, who used economic data from different countries to "prove" that the pursuit of austerity (low government spending) was actually a good policy to follow even during recessions.

Finance ministers around the world looked at this research to guide them in policy decision making. But then a student, conducting his own research, asked the authors if he could access their underlying data for his project. He was sent the data files and when he looked at the data, he was unable to reproduce the same conclusions. He looked closer and noticed there was a formula error in Excel which excluded an entire set of data, which skewed the results in favor of the conclusions published. If this data had been included, the outcome would have been very different....

This is the original article

https://www.nber.org/papers/w15639