You have come up with an important question, you have the perfect data to answer the question, you have come up with a solid identification strategy, you have no mistakes in your code, but then...
What to do when this happens? See David Evans old blog entry here. Good journals will publish this type of work, but it needs to be done well. Also, they should really change people's priors. If no one believes that X will affect Y and find that indeed X has no impact on Y, well, that's probably not going to a top journal. But if everyone takes for granted that X affects Y and you find no evidence of this, then that's something. My favorite recent example of this is this paper showing that nudging college students to study, doesn't really help. Ok, but what if you find yourself in the first category. No one really thought X would affect Y and "surprise", you find no evidence of it. Well, there's a journal for those results, too! The Journal of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE). Read more about it here. I'm really excited about this journal, not only because it may be a home for future papers, but because it's good for science! Those insignificant, unsurprising results also help us learn about the world. They shouldn't all be hidden in people's hard drives and filing cabinets.
P.S.
But before concluding that there is no effect, be sure to check your code for coding errors. And now check again.
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