Forking Paths In Empirical Studies

Videos

Guillaume Coqueret, Associate Professor, Emlyon Business School, and Dr. Hossein Kazemi, Senior Advisor, FDP Institute, discussed the importance of small variations in the implementation protocol of applied studies. This presentation shared why we advocate the usefulness of reporting a wide range of outcomes in empirical work, based on many variations of design choices. This allows us to characterize the effects more exhaustively and leads to more robust conclusions. We illustrated these ideas in two studies: one on equity premium prediction and one on portfolio sorts (asset pricing anomalies, i.e., factors).