I don’t know how many referee reports I’ve received over the course of my career – certainly many thousand. Some have been insightful and helpful, some have missed the point entirely, and some have been outright nasty. But I just got the nicest report I’ve ever had, and I can’t resist sharing the opening paras, with my thanks to the anonymous referee. The paper in question is my contribution to a special issue of Econometrics on the replication crisis, arguing that the crisis can be understood as a kind of market failure. Here’s a link to the draft
*Report 2*
This paper is as I expect from this (actually quite famous) author, i.e. insightful. provocative, polished, knowledgeable, analytically very tight, and just overall a pleasure to read. If there were more researchers like him, the issue he raises would not exist in the first place. You can publish this paper as is, forthwith, with thanks to the author for sending it to Econometrics.
I have read the significance test literature since the early 80s, and this line of argument is totally fresh. I believe that if the author wanted to run hard with it and play the politics enough, it could go in somewhere like AER. I suspect that he would like to work on other things and is not ready to do that, so you can grab it while you have the chance.
John Quiggin 
I hadn’t really thought about replication issues in terms of market failure before (actually, maybe I’ve had a few discussions along these lines, but never really crystalised the thoughts).
Fresh lines of reasoning indeed: well done, and thanks for access to the paper.
Thanks JQ and well done.
We already knew “… this (actually quite famous) author, i.e. insightful. provocative, polished, knowledgeable, analytically very tight, and just overall a pleasure to read. If there were more researchers like him, the issue he raises would not exist in the first place.”.
I wish this line were true though “If there were more researchers like him, the issue he raises would not exist in the first place”. Correct historically maybe but regretably, not contemporaneously.
Thanks for sharing John – and congrats – always great to get some encouragement!
I wonder if this statement has any bearing, even tangential, on J.Q.’s paper.
“The unsellability of DSGE — private-sector firms do not pay lots of money to use DSGE models — is a strong argument against DSGE.” – Lars Syll.
Here we are not talking about market failure but the failure to sell something on the market, namely an abstract academic model which is not congruent with empirical reality: i.e. it does not demonstrate reliable isomorphic relations with the reality it attempts to describe.