A new paper by BD McCullough and Ross McKitrick throws cold water on the notion of economic inquiry as being even mildly scientific, because the studies we do can't, largely, be replicated. Really, their paper is a call for due diligence in economic modeling. They write:
Few journals require that data be archived, and those that have such requirements do not reliably enforce them. Even fewer require authors to disclose the software they used for statistical computations. As a result, the time cost of attempting to replicate published studies is extremely high, and replication efforts are rare. The few systematic attempts of which we are aware give surprisingly strong grounds for pessimism regarding the veracity and reproducibility of much empirical research...In practice it is rare for scientists to make their data and code accessible, and it is rare for scientists to replicate one another's work, in part because it can be so difficult to get the data.
This is a devastating claim, and McCullough has an excellent pedigree with regard to these types of studies, just check his CV.