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...

While gold objects have existed for thousands of years, gold's role in diversified portfolios is not well understood. We critically examine popular stories such as 'gold is an inflation hedge'. We show that gold may be an effective hedge if the investment horizon is measured in centuries. Over...

We survey more than 1,000 CEOs and CFOs to understand how capital is allocated, and decision-making authority is delegated, within firms. We find that CEOs are least likely to share or delegate decision-making authority in mergers and acquisitions, relative to delegation of capital structure,...

Blockchain is a special type of database that cannot be easily manipulated or hacked. Sometimes called distributed ledger technology, the database is shared by many computers, called nodes. The components of the database are broken up into blocks or sheets. One of the ingenious ideas is that the...

Using 14,800 forecasts of one-year S&P 500 returns made by Chief Financial Officers over a 12-year period, we track the individual executives who provide multiple forecasts to study how their beliefs evolve dynamically. While CFOs’ return forecasts are systematically unbiased, their confidence...

We present interview evidence from financial executives that highlights how thinking about culture in a quantitative way and making continuous investments in culture can amplify success, improve firm value, and help employees thrive in the new world of work. By reporting financial executives’...

While the advent of cryptocurrencies and digital assets holds promise for improving and disrupting financial systems by offering cheap, quick, and secure transfer of value, it also opens up new payment channels for cybercrimes. A prerequisite to solving a problem is understanding the nature of...

We revisit an investment experiment that compares the performance of an investor using Bayesian methods for determining portfolio weights with an investor that uses the Monte Carlo based resampling approach advocated in Michaud (1998). Markowitz and Usmen (2003) showed that the Michaud investor...