This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...

The paper considers the Markov-Switching GARCH(1,1)-model with time-varying transition probabilities. It derives sufficient conditions for the square of the process to display long memory and provides some additional intuition for the empirical observation that estimated GARCH-parameters often...

We investigate the impact of the 20 largest - in terms of insured losses - man-made or natural disasters on various insurance industry stock indices. We show via an event study that insurance sectors worldwide are quite resilient, in a market-value sense, to unexpected losses to capital: our...

We argue against the view that it is mostly the peaks of the empirical densities of stock returns (and of other risky returns as well) that set such data aside from quot;normalquot; variables. We show that peaks depend on sample size and on the way returns are standardized, and that for given...

The paper investigates short-horizon individual stock returns; it exhibits statistically and economically significant autocorrelations, which for stock returns have so far been established mainly over long horizons, also for certain daily data, in particular between monday returns and various...

We try to replicate the findings in Saunders (1993) that stock prices are quot;systematically affected by local weatherquot;. Using German data, we find that whether or not the null hypothesis of no relationship can be rejected depends mostly on the way the null hypothesis is phrased, and that...

We show that a recent appendix to the Gini-coefficient to make the latter more sensitive to asymmetric income distributions can be viewed as an abstract measure of skewness. We develop some of its properties and apply it to the US-income distribution in 1974 and 2010

We plot aggregated daily stock returns with absolute value less than x against x and show empirically that this produces a typical spoon-shaped pattern which indicates a special type of asymmetry which has not been discussed before. This pattern disappears when individual returns are averaged; it...

We propose a new method (implemented in an R-program) to simulate long-range daily stock-price data. The program reproduces various stylized facts much better than various parametric models from the extended GARCH-family. In particular, the empirically observed changes in unconditional variance...