In a provocative article Ioannidis (2005) argues that, in disciplines employing statistical tests of significance, professional journals report more wrong than true significant results. This short note sketches the argument and explores under what conditions the assertion holds. The “positive...

Significance tests were originally developed to enable more objective evaluations of research results. Yet the strong orientation towards statistical significance encourages biased results, a phenomenon termed “publication bias”. Publication bias occurs whenever the likelihood or time-lag of...

I derive a rigorous method to help determine whether a true parameter takes a value between two arbitrarily chosen points for a given level of confidence via a multiple testing procedure which strongly controls the familywise error rate. For any test size, the distance between the upper and...

We examine how the criteria for choosing estimation samples affect the ability to detect discretionary accruals, using several variants of the Jones (1991) model. Researchers commonly estimate accruals models in cross-section, and define the estimation sample as all firms in the same industry....

We propose a new specification test to assess the validity of the judge leniency design. We characterize a set of sharp testable implications, which exploit all the relevant information in the observed data distribution to detect violations of the judge leniency design assumptions. The proposed...

This paper shows that a multiple regression with two highly correlated explanatory variables, both of them with a near zero correlation with the dependent variable may correspond to a spurious regression or to a homeostatic model, with estimates highly sensible to outliers. The regression method...

In this article, tests for globalization and contagion are separated using an ex ante definition of crises, and contagion tests are neutralized with respect to globalization effects. A large database is constructed to study the stability of correlation matrices for four asset classes: equities,...

The present article considers Bayesian unit root test for autoregressive model involving structural break in variance. The posterior odds ratio for testing of unit root hypothesis against the alternative of break in variance has been derived under appropriate prior assumptions for the...

To test the existence of spatial dependence in an econometric model, a convenient test is the Lagrange Multiplier (LM) test. However, evidence shows that, in finite samples, the LM test referring to asymptotic critical values may suffer from the problems of size distortion and low power, which...

Indonesia has a very good record of poverty reduction, having halved its incidence over the past two decades. Nevertheless, almost 30 million people still live below the national poverty line, mostly in rural areas and in certain provinces. In order to make further progress in lifting these...