It always bugged me how we use present tense in finance papers. Shouldn't we say "the coefficient *was* economically and statistically significant?", instead of *is*?
Or, we can stick our necks out and say "*was* significant, and we predict it will continue to be so".
How much of published finance holds up?
I attempted to replicate the main result of every paper in JF, JFE & RFS, 2000–2020.
1,328 in-sample replications; 1,005 out-of-sample. 75% reproduced in sample. But only 42% in later data. Median coeff. : 0.93 → 0.45 of the published.