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The student wrote a polite email to the paper’s first author, Almas Heshmati, a professor of economics at Jönköping University in Sweden, asking how he dealt with the missing data. In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values and dragged the selected cells down or up, depending on the case. The program then filled in the blanks. If the new numbers turned negative, Heshmati replaced them with the last positive value Excel had spit out.