We provide data and code that successfully reproduces nearly all crosssectional stock return predictors. Unlike most metastudies, we carefully examine the original papers to determine whether our predictability tests should produce t-stats above 1.96. For the 180 predictors that were clearly...

Suppose that asset pricing factors are just p-hacked noise. How much p-hacking is required to produce the 300 factors documented by academics? I show that, if 10,000 academics generate 1 factor every minute, it takes 15 million years of p-hacking. This absurd conclusion comes from applying the...

We develop an estimator for publication bias and apply it to 156 hedge portfolios based on published cross-sectional return predictors. Publication bias adjusted returns are only 12% smaller than in-sample returns. The small bias comes from the dispersion of returns across predictors, which is...