I will address eight common claims about bitcoin: 1. Physical bitcoins exist; 2. The founder of bitcoin is a person called Satoshi Nakamoto; 3. Bitcoin is mainly used for criminal activity; 4. A lack of security plagues bitcoin; 5. Mining is a waste of energy; 6. Bitcoin too small today to be an...

Cryptography is about communication in the presence of an adversary. Cryptofinance is the efficient exchange of ownership, the verification of ownership, as well as the ability to algorithmically design conditional contracts, all with security, privacy, and minimal trust without using...

The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top...

Our legacy financial infrastructure has both limited growth opportunities and contributed to the inequality of opportunities. Around the world, 1.7 billion are unbanked. Small businesses, even those with a banking relationship, often must rely on high-cost financing, such as credit cards,...

<p>Despite the crucial importance of high quality reviewing for the scientific process, new scholars often learn how to do this based on casual advice and trial-and-error learning. We offer a checklist that helps referees systematically develop high quality referee reports and avoid some of the...</p>

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....

Over my six years as editor at the Journal of Finance (2006-2012), I handled approximately 7,500 submissions. Even at the point of my “retirement” on July 1, 2012, I still had more than 500 manuscripts under my control. This paper gives some of the historical background as well as offering...

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...

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...

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"