Consolidation of academic results in empirical economics is important. Within many parts of economics, applied papers often throw up contradictory results. For example, one paper may find that countries can copy technology innovated in another country, while another paper may find that they cannot.
Sometimes the difference can be explained by known theory - technology adoption may be the result of different levels of education and physical capital in the absorbing countries, for example - but other times the differences in results are not so easily explained. They may arise because of different data quality, estimation methodologies, researcher accuracy, or a host of other factors.
It is easy to state that "paper 1 finds something, paper 2 finds something else, and we find something that agrees with paper 1". Consolidating and explaining differences in the papers' results is more valuable because it reduces the uncertainty about all the results, not just collecting a further piece of evidence. The extra understanding can form the basis of comprehensive theorising at all stages of analysis. It is more difficult, but a great outcome of literature review.
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