We revisit the nature of returns to scale beginning with Pástor, Stambaugh, and Taylor (2015). We find that the documented negative relation between scale (at both the fund and industry levels) and return performance is an artifact of extreme observations that comprise less than 0.05% of the...

Recent research suggests that improper identification of outliers can lead to distorted inference. We investigate this issue by examining the role that multivariate outliers play in research outcomes using the Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004) study. We find that the documented negative...

Recent research suggests that improper identification of outliers can lead to distorted inference. We investigate this issue by examining the role that multivariate outliers play in research outcomes using the Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004) study. We find that the documented negative...

Trading costs are a significant, but unobserved, drag on mutual fund performance. Because an index fund does not engage in securities selection or market timing, its net benchmark-adjusted return is equivalent, but opposite in sign, to its net trading costs. Using a sample of index funds, we...

Articles in the top finance journals largely ignore the potential of outlier-induced bias in empirical research. When finance researchers do address outliers they use techniques that tend to cause additional problems. We illustrate the problems via simulations as well as replications of studies...

We investigate whether outliers in cross-country samples and the common methods we use to address them affect the trustworthiness of our empirical results. Our analysis begins by documenting recent international business (IB) research practices in the identification and treatment of outliers. We...

This article is the first to examine financial restatements by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). We provide a descriptive breakdown of the underlying causes of REIT restatements as well as overall and subsample analyses of stock market reactions to restatements from 2000 to 2011. REIT...