This paper reviews important concepts and methods that are useful for hypothesis testing.First, we discuss the Neyman-Pearson framework. Various approaches to optimalityare presented, including finite-sample and large-sample optimality. Then, some of the mostimportant methods are summarized, as...

Consider the problem of testing s hypotheses simultaneously. In order to deal with themultiplicity problem, the classical approach is to restrict attention to procedures that controlthe familywise error rate (FWE). Typically, it is known how to construct tests of the individualhypotheses, and...

Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number ofhedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selectioncan be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone,using advanced statistical...

Return event studies generally involve several companies but there are also cases when only one company is involved. This makes the relevant testing problems, abnormal return (AR) and cumulative abnormal return (CAR), more difficult since one cannot exploit the multitude of companies (by using a...

Conditional heteroskedasticity of the error terms is a common occurrence in financial factor models, such as the CAPM and Fama-French factor models. This feature necessitates the use of heteroskedasticity consistent (HC) standard errors to make valid inference for regression coefficients. In...

This paper estimates the curvature of the Earth, defined as one over its radius, without using any physics. The orthodox model is that the Earth is nearly spherical with a curvature of Û/20, 000 km. By contrast, the heterodox flat-Earth model stipulates a curvature of zero. Abstracting from the...

Return event studies generally involve several firms but there are also cases when only one firm is involved. This makes the relevant testing problems, abnormal return (AR) and cumulative abnormal return (CAR), more difficult since one cannot exploit the multitude of firms (by using a relevant...

Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns should monotonicallyincrease in a certain characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, onetypically considers a finite number of return categories, ordered according to the underlyingcharacteristic. A standard...

Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies;in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implementthe global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for theequality of variances....

Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns strictly increase in an underlying characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, one needs to take the entire range of the characteristic into account, as is done in the recent proposal of Patton and Timmermann...