This alternative explanation for AJR’s famous result has never been rejected, and it’s so important that the Nobel committee saw the need to issue a disclaimer about it in their prize announcement…
This is a pretty startling thing to have to put in a Nobel Prize announcement, isn’t it? It basically amounts to saying “Well, this result doesn’t actually prove the researchers’ hypothesis, and in fact the hypothesis probably can’t be proven, but we’re going to give it a Nobel anyway because it’s strongly suggestive.” If you want economics to be more of a science and less of a branch of philosophy, that’s not the kind of thing you want to have to write!