Politicians, commentators, and activists widely cited the paper in political debates over the effectiveness of austerity in fiscal policy for debt-burdened economies.
[3] In 2013, academic critics accused Reinhart and Rogoff of employing methodology that suffered from 3 major errors; they asserted that the underlying data did not support the authors' conclusions.
These critics held that the Reinhart–Rogoff paper had led to unjustified adoption of austerity policies for countries with various levels of public debt.
[12] In their critique of Reinhart and Rogoff's paper, University of Massachusetts Amherst economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin pointed out that "Growth in a Time of Debt" was influential on the United States Republican Party's budget proposal "The Path to Prosperity" (commonly referred to as the "Paul Ryan budget"):[13] RR 2010a [Growth in a Time of Debt] is the only evidence cited in the "Paul Ryan Budget" on the consequences of high public debt for economic growth.
In April 2013, HAP released a critique of the RR data analysis in the working paper "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth?
[18][4] HAP concluded that the "combination of the collapse of the empirical result that high public debt is inevitably associated with greatly reduced GDP growth and the weakness of the theoretical mechanism under current conditions... render the Reinhart and Rogoff point close to irrelevant for current public policy debate.
"[4] RR published a lengthy, detailed response to HAP in The New York Times:[19] Herndon, Ash and Pollin accurately point out the coding error that omits several countries from the averages in figure 2.
[20][22] Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in 2013:[23] What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses.