Do you know of any external, authoritative studies demonstrating this? I know it's true from long experience of seeing it happen repeatedly, but I'd like to poi

Do you know of any external, authoritative studies demonstrating this? I know it's true from long experience of seeing it happen repeatedly, but I'd like to point at something that can justify a 'refactoring sprint' or something like that to try tackling the impact of this pattern. The other justification is that clean refactored codebases are quicker to change, but it's a difficult sell.