The multiple testing problem plagues many important issues in finance such as fund and factor selection. Many look good purely by luck. There are a number of statistical techniques to control for multiplicity that reduce Type I errors - but it is unknown by how much. We propose a new way to...

Identifying the factors that drive the cross-section of expected returns is challenging for at least three reasons. First, the choice of testing approach (time-series versus cross-sectional) will deliver different sets of factors. Second, varying test portfolio sorts changes the importance of...

We propose a new way to conduct multiple hypothesis testing in economics research. Our framework allows for correlation among tests and incomplete data, both of which are prevalent in economic meta-analysis. Our simulations show that that our method is able to produce the correct p-value cutoff...

We provide some new tools to evaluate trading strategies. When it is known that many strategies and combinations of strategies have been tried, we need to adjust our evaluation method for these multiple tests. Sharpe Ratios and other statistics will be overstated. Our methods are simple to...

Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2016) argue that a large proportion of published asset-pricing factors are likely false. Researchers may try many variables and report only the significant ones, so-called p-hacking. Some recent work challenges the prevalence of p-hacking and argues that the amount of...

When evaluating a trading strategy, it is routine to discount the Sharpe ratio from a historical backtest. The reason is simple: there is inevitable data mining by both the researcher and by other researchers in the past. Our paper provides a statistical framework that systematically accounts...

Hundreds of papers and hundreds of factors attempt to explain the cross-section of expected returns. Given this extensive data mining, it does not make any economic or statistical sense to use the usual significance criteria for a newly discovered factor, e.g., a t-ratio greater than 2.0....

This is the transcription of the American Finance Association's Presidential Address of January 7, 2017. The address is based on the paper "'https://ssrn.com/abstract=2893930' The Scientific Outlook in Financial Economics"

Given the competition for top journal space, there is an incentive to produce “significant” results. With the combination of unreported tests, lack of adjustment for multiple tests, and direct and indirect p-hacking, many of the results being published will fail to hold up in the future. In...

We analyze the history of the equity risk premium from surveys of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) conducted every quarter from June 2000 to June 2010. The risk premium is the expected 10-year S&P 500 return relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield. While the risk premium sharply...