The journals are full of great studies but can we believe the statistics? Revisiting the Mass Privatisation - Mortality Debate

► Cross-national panel data contain myriad cross-sectional and temporal dependencies. ► Research which fails to explore the temporal properties of this type of data faces heightened risks of producing misleading results. ► The finding that mass privatisation was a crucial determinant of male mortality fluctuations in 1990s Eastern Europe falls into this category. ► Once better consideration is given to the true underlying data generation process the finding is rejected. ► We propose a number of procedural, conceptual and methodological steps for researchers in this field that we would like to see adopted.