Macroeconomics is not a healthy field making rapid progress. David D. Friedman’s verdict on it is that we know very little is true but we know plenty that isn’t. If you want to see someone really ripping into macro read Paul Romer’s The Trouble With Macroeconomics[1]. All that said I know what happens when you contract the money supply; you get a recession. Print lots of money; you’ll get inflation. Decrease inflation; your currency will appreciate. There’s plenty more like that. Purchasing power parity works as a theory of exchange rate formation over the long run and nothing does over the short run. Macroeconomists know plenty.
Regarding theory and replication, on rent control I see Montreal and raise you Mumbai[2]. If the rent controlled price is near the market price the damage will be pretty mild. If you haven’t allowed rents to rise since the 1960’s things will be worse. On replication, more than three quarters of cancer biology papers don’t replicate so the fact that some economics papers get retracted doesn’t disturb me too greatly[3]. If you’re doing science sometimes you find out you were wrong or that you made a mistake.
[1]https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fh4tPWYeks
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/2sEX5MD7aW1whVkxFllNCL/Rent...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tw...
[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what-pro...
> In 2011, Bayer Healthcare said that its in-house scientists could only validate 25 percent of basic studies in cancer and other conditions. (Drug companies routinely do such checks so they can use the information in those studies as a starting point for developing new drugs.) A year later, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis from Amgen said that the firm could only confirm the findings in 6 out of 53 landmark cancer papers—just 11 percent. Perhaps, they wrote, that might explain why “our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low.”