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209 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Economics, Econometrics and Finance. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Sanctions and Imports of Essential Goods: A Closer Look at the Equipo Anova (2021) Results

Francisco Rodríguez · 2022 · arXiv

We revisit the results of a recent paper by Equipo Anova, who claim to find evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in 2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and questionable methodological choices, including the use an unreasonable functional form that implies a counterfactual of negative imports in the absence of sanctions, the omission of data accounting for four-fifths of the country's food imports at the time of sanctions and incorrect application of re

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Assessing and Comparing Fixed-Target Forecasts of Arctic Sea Ice: Glide Charts for Feature-Engineered Linear Regression and Machine Learning Models

Francis X. Diebold, Maximilian Goebel, Philippe Goulet Coulombe · 2022 · arXiv

We use "glide charts" (plots of sequences of root mean squared forecast errors as the target date is approached) to evaluate and compare fixed-target forecasts of Arctic sea ice. We first use them to evaluate the simple feature-engineered linear regression (FELR) forecasts of Diebold and Goebel (2021), and to compare FELR forecasts to naive pure-trend benchmark forecasts. Then we introduce a much more sophisticated feature-engineered machine learning (FEML) model, and we use glide charts to evaluate FEML forecasts and compare them to a FELR benchmark. Our substantive results include the freque

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

The interaction between trade and FDI: the CEE countries experience

Claudiu Tiberiu Albulescu, Daniel Goyeau · 2016 · arXiv

Inside the EU, the commercial integration of the CEE countries has gained remarkable momentum before the crisis appearance, but it has slightly slowed down afterwards. Consequently, the interest in identifying the factors supporting the commercial integration process is high. Recent findings in the new trade theory suggest that FDI influence the trade intensity but the studies approaching this relationship for the CEE countries present mixed evidence, and investigate the commercial integration of CEE countries with the old EU members. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to as

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Long-Term Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage in Germany: New Data and Estimators

Marco Caliendo, Nico Pestel, Rebecca Olthaus · 2023 · arXiv

We study the long-term effects of the 2015 German minimum wage introduction and its subsequent increases on regional employment. Using data from two waves of the Structure of Earnings Survey allows us to estimate models that account for changes in the minimum wage bite over time. While the introduction mainly affected the labour market in East Germany, the raises are also increasingly affecting low-wage regions in West Germany, such that around one third of regions have changed their (binary) treatment status over time. We apply different specifications and extensions of the classic difference

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

A Financial Risk Analysis: Does the 2008 Financial Crisis Give Impact on Weekends Returns of the U.S. Movie Box Office?

Novriana Sumarti, Rafki Hidayat · 2013 · arXiv

The Financial Crisis of 2008 is a worldwide financial crisis causing a worldwide economic decline that is the most severe since the 1930s. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the global financial crisis gave impact on USD 3.4 trillion losses from financial institutions around the world between 2007 and 2010. Does the crisis give impact on the returns of the U.S. movie Box Office? It will be answered by doing an analysis on the financial risk model based on Extreme Value Theory (EVT) and calculations of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). The values of VaR and ES fr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Has EU accession boosted patents performance in the EU-13? -- A critical evaluation using causal impact analysis with Bayesian structural time-series models

Agnieszka Kleszcz, Krzysztof Rusek · 2022 · arXiv

Nowadays innovation is one of the main determinants of economic development. Patents are a key measure of innovation output, as patent indicators reflect the inventive performance of countries, technologies and firms. This paper provides new insights on the causal effects of the enlargement of the European Union (EU) by investigating the patents performance within the new EU member states (EU-13). The empirical results based on data collected from the OECD database from 1985-2017 and causal impact using a Bayesian structural time-series model (proposed by Google) point towards a conclusion tha

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Board gender diversity and emissions performance: Insights from panel regressions, machine learning, and explainable AI

Mohammad Hassan Shakil, Arne Johan Pollestad, Khine Kyaw et al. · 2025 · arXiv

With European Union initiatives mandating gender quotas on corporate boards, a key question arises: Is greater board gender diversity (BGD) associated with better emissions performance (EP)? To answer this question, we examine the influence of BGD on EP across a sample of European firms from 2016 to 2022. Using panel regressions, advanced machine learning algorithms, and explainable AI, we reveal a non-linear relationship. Specifically, EP improves with BGD up to an optimal level of approximately 35 %, beyond which further increases in BGD yield no additional improvement in EP. A minimum BGD t

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Effects of dynamic capability and marketing strategy on the organizational performance of the banking sector in Makassar, Indonesia

Akhmad Muhammadin, Rashila Ramli, Syamsul Ridjal et al. · 2020 · arXiv

The dynamic capability and marketing strategy are challenges to the banking sector in Indonesia. This study uses a survey method solving 39 banks in Makassar. Data collection was conducted of questionnaires. The results show that, the dynamic capability has a positive yet insignificant impact on the organizational performance, the marketing strategy has a positive and significant effect on organizational performance and, dynamic capability and marketing strategy have a positive and significant effect on the organization's performance in the banking sector in Makassar. Keywords : dynamic capabi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Searching for Smurfs: Testing if Money Launderers Know Alert Thresholds

Rasmus Ingemann Tuffveson Jensen, Joras Ferwerda, Christian Remi Wewer · 2023 · arXiv

Objectives: To combat money laundering, banks raise and review alerts on transactions that exceed confidential thresholds. However, the thresholds may be leaked to criminals, allowing them to break up large transactions into amounts under the thresholds. This paper introduces a data-driven approach to detect the phenomenon, popularly known as smurfing. Methods: Our approach compares an observed transaction distribution to a counterfactual distribution estimated using a high-degree polynomial. We investigate the approach with simulation experiments and real transaction data from a systemically

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Structural Limits of OHLCV-Based Intraday Signals in MNQ Futures: A Systematic Falsification Study

Mathias Mesfin · 2026 · arXiv

This paper tests whether intraday momentum signals derived from open-high-low-close-volume (OHLCV) data produce a statistically significant trading edge in Micro E-mini Nasdaq 100 futures (MNQ) under realistic execution constraints. Using 947 trading days of five-minute data (2021-2025), fourteen signal families are evaluated, including opening range breakouts, gap strategies, volume signals, cross-session momentum, liquidity grabs, volatility-conditioned classifiers, and news-driven strategies. All signals are assessed using strict institutional criteria: out-of-sample walk-forward validation

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Do Whitepaper Claims Predict Market Behavior? Evidence from Cryptocurrency Factor Analysis

Murad Farzulla · 2026 · arXiv

This study investigates whether cryptocurrency whitepaper narratives align with empirically observed market factor structure. We construct a pipeline combining zero-shot NLP classification of 38 whitepapers across 10 semantic categories with CP tensor decomposition of hourly market data (49 assets, 17,543 timestamps). Using Procrustes rotation and Tucker's congruence coefficient (phi), we find weak alignment between claims and market statistics (phi = 0.246, p = 0.339) and between claims and latent factors (phi = 0.058, p = 0.751). A methodological validation comparison (statistics versus fact

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

A Note on Delta Hedging in Markets with Jumps

Aleksandar Mijatović, Mikhail Urusov · 2011 · arXiv

Modelling stock prices via jump processes is common in financial markets. In practice, to hedge a contingent claim one typically uses the so-called delta-hedging strategy. This strategy stems from the Black--Merton--Scholes model where it perfectly replicates contingent claims. From the theoretical viewpoint, there is no reason for this to hold in models with jumps. However in practice the delta-hedging strategy is widely used and its potential shortcoming in models with jumps is disregarded since such models are typically incomplete and hence most contingent claims are non-attainable. In this

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

The Informativeness of Combined Experimental and Observational Data under Dynamic Selection

Yechan Park, Yuya Sasaki · 2024 · arXiv

This paper addresses the challenge of estimating the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated Survivors (ATETS; Vikstrom et al., 2018) in the absence of long-term experimental data, utilizing available long-term observational data instead. We establish two theoretical results. First, it is impossible to obtain informative bounds for the ATETS with no model restriction and no auxiliary data. Second, to overturn this negative result, we explore as a promising avenue the recent econometric developments in combining experimental and observational data (e.g., Athey et al., 2020, 2019); we indeed fin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

The Machiavellian frontier of stable mechanisms

Qiufu Chen, Yuanmei Li, Xiaopeng Yin et al. · 2024 · arXiv

The impossibility theorem in Roth (1982) states that no stable mechanism satisfies strategy-proofness. This paper explores the Machiavellian frontier of stable mechanisms by weakening strategy-proofness. For a fixed mechanism $\varphi$ and a true preference profile $\succ$, a $(\varphi,\succ)$-boost mispresentation of agent i is a preference of i that is obtained by (i) raising the ranking of the truth-telling assignment $\varphi_i(\succ)$, and (ii) keeping rankings unchanged above the new position of this truth-telling assignment. We require a matching mechanism $\varphi$ neither punish nor r

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Obstacles to Redistribution Through Markets and One Solution

Roy Allen, John Rehbeck · 2021 · arXiv

Dworczak et al. (2021) study when certain market structures are optimal in the presence of heterogeneous preferences. A key assumption is that the social planner knows the joint distribution of the value of the good and marginal value of money. This paper studies whether relevant features of this distribution are identified from choice data. We show that the features of the distribution needed to characterize optimal market structure cannot be identified when demand is known for all prices. While this is a negative result, we show that the distribution of good value and marginal utility of mon

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

The Trade-off Between Minimal Instability and Larger Improvements over Deferred Acceptance

Taylor Knipe, Josue Ortega · 2025 · arXiv

The celebrated Efficiency-Adjusted Deferred Acceptance mechanism (EADA) improves the efficiency of the DA algorithm via consented priority violations. Notwithstanding its many merits, we show that EADA can improve only two students when an alternative mechanism that Pareto-dominates DA could benefit all but one student. This shortfall in the number of students improved is not exclusive of EADA but extends to all setwise minimally unstable mechanisms, i.e. those that generate a set of blocking pairs that is never a strict superset of that of another mechanism. The incompatibility between number

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Take Caution in Using LLMs as Human Surrogates: Scylla Ex Machina

Yuan Gao, Dokyun Lee, Gordon Burtch et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Recent studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can exhibit human-like reasoning, aligning with human behavior in economic experiments, surveys, and political discourse. This has led many to propose that LLMs can be used as surrogates or simulations for humans in social science research. However, LLMs differ fundamentally from humans, relying on probabilistic patterns, absent the embodied experiences or survival objectives that shape human cognition. We assess the reasoning depth of LLMs using the 11-20 money request game. Nearly all advanced approaches fail to replicate human behavior dis

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Informer in Algorithmic Investment Strategies on High Frequency Bitcoin Data

Filip Stefaniuk, Robert Ślepaczuk · 2025 · arXiv

The article investigates the usage of Informer architecture for building automated trading strategies for high frequency Bitcoin data. Three strategies using Informer model with different loss functions: Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Generalized Mean Absolute Directional Loss (GMADL) and Quantile loss, are proposed and evaluated against the Buy and Hold benchmark and two benchmark strategies based on technical indicators. The evaluation is conducted using data of various frequencies: 5 minute, 15 minute, and 30 minute intervals, over the 6 different periods. Although the Informer-based model

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Judgment in macroeconomic output growth predictions: Efficiency, accuracy and persistence

Michael Pedersen · 2024 · arXiv

The present study applies observations of individual predictions of the first three releases of the US output growth rate to evaluate how the applied judgment affects prediction efficiency and accuracy as well as if judgment is persistent. While the first two issues have been assessed in other studies, there is little evidence on the formation of judgment in macroeconomic projections. Most of the forecasters produce unbiased predictions, but employing the median Bloomberg projection as baseline, it turns out that judgment generally does not improve accuracy. There seems to be persistence in th

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Testing the simplicity of strategy-proof mechanisms

Alexander L. Brown, Daniel G. Stephenson, Rodrigo A. Velez · 2024 · arXiv

This paper experimentally evaluates four mechanisms intended to achieve the Uniform outcome in rationing problems (Sprumont, 1991). Our benchmark is the dominant-strategy, direct-revelation mechanism of the Uniform rule. A strategically equivalent mechanism that provides non-binding feedback during the reporting period greatly improves performance. A sequential revelation mechanism produces modest improvements despite not possessing dominant strategies. A novel, obviously strategy-proof mechanism, devised by Arribillaga et al. (2023), does not improve performance. We characterize each alternat

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Does Anxiety Improve Economic Decision-Making?

Ian Crawford, Carl-Emil Pless · 2026 · arXiv

We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on average equal to around half of day-to-day consumption budgets. While material circumstances help explain decision-making quality, how people feel about those circumstances is equally important. Contrary to evidence that stress and worry impair performance in settings where distraction is costly, we find these same feelings are associated with improved decis

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Interbank network reconstruction enforcing density and reciprocity

Valentina Macchiati, Piero Mazzarisi, Diego Garlaschelli · 2024 · arXiv

Networks of financial exposures are the key propagators of risk and distress among banks, but their empirical structure is not publicly available because of confidentiality. This limitation has triggered the development of methods of network reconstruction from partial, aggregate information. Unfortunately, even the best methods available fail in replicating the number of directed cycles, which on the other hand play a crucial role in determining graph spectra and hence the degree of network stability and systemic risk. Here we address this challenge by exploiting the hypothesis that the stati

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Deep Smoothing of the Implied Volatility Surface

Damien Ackerer, Natasa Tagasovska, Thibault Vatter · 2019 · arXiv

We present a neural network (NN) approach to fit and predict implied volatility surfaces (IVSs). Atypically to standard NN applications, financial industry practitioners use such models equally to replicate market prices and to value other financial instruments. In other words, low training losses are as important as generalization capabilities. Importantly, IVS models need to generate realistic arbitrage-free option prices, meaning that no portfolio can lead to risk-free profits. We propose an approach guaranteeing the absence of arbitrage opportunities by penalizing the loss using soft const

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Do COVID-19 and crude oil prices drive the US economic policy uncertainty?

Claudiu Albulescu · 2020 · arXiv

This paper investigates the effect of the novel coronavirus and crude oil prices on the United States (US) economic policy uncertainty (EPU). Using daily data for the period January 21-March 13, 2020, our Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model shows that the new infection cases reported at global level, and the death ratio, have no significant effect on the US EPU, whereas the oil price negative dynamics leads to increased uncertainty. However, analyzing the situation outside China, we discover that both new case announcements and the COVID-19 associated death ratio have a positive influe

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

A Study on Impact of Dividend Policy on Initial Public Offering Price Performance

S. Meghna, N. Suresh, J. C. Usha · 2022 · arXiv

This study examines the impact of dividend policy on the performance of initial public offerings in India. The period of study is from the year 2011-2014. Monthly returns of the IPOs issued in the considered period and the Indian Stock Market Index (Nifty 50) were considered for the long-run performance study. The methodological tools used are long-run performance statistics and the GARCH model. The Dummy variable was used to measure the effect of dividends on the IPOs. The study reveals that the dividend policy has no significant effect on the stock prices of IPO.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

A Review of Disease and Development

Ruiwu Liu · 2021 · arXiv

Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) put forward the unprecedented view that health improvement has no significant effect on income growth. To arrive at this conclusion, they constructed predicted mortality as an instrumental variable based on the WHO international disease interventions to analyse this problem. I replicate the process of their research and eliminate some biases in their estimate. In addition, and more importantly, we argue that the construction of their instrumental variable contains a violation of the exclusion restriction of their instrumental variable. This negative correlation betw

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Elementary Bitcoin economics: from production and transaction demand to values

Misha Perepelitsa · 2022 · arXiv

In this paper we give an elementary analysis of economics of Bitcoin that combines the transaction demand by the consumers and the supply of hashrate by miners. We argue that the decreasing block reward will have no significant effect on the exchange rate (price) of Bitcoin and thus the network will be transitioning to a regime where transaction fees will play a bigger part of miners' revenue. We consider a simple model where consumers demand bitcoins for transactions, but not for hoarding bitcoins, and we analyze market equilibrium where the demand is matched with the hashrate supplied by min

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Public Support for Environmental Regulation: When Ideology Trumps Knowledge

Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt, Max R. P. Grossmann · 2025 · arXiv

When environmental regulations are unpopular, policymakers often attribute resistance to information frictions and poor communication. We test this idea in the context of a major climate policy: Germany's Heating Law of 2023, which mandates the phase-out of fossil fuel heating. Through a survey experiment with property owners, we examine whether providing comprehensive information about the regulation's costs, requirements, and timeline affects adoption decisions and policy support. Despite successfully increasing factual knowledge, information provision has no significant effect on intended t

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Affine term structure models : a time-changed approach with perfect fit to market curves

Cheikh Mbaye, Frédéric Vrins · 2019 · arXiv

We address the so-called calibration problem which consists of fitting in a tractable way a given model to a specified term structure like, e.g., yield or default probability curves. Time-homogeneous jump-diffusions like Vasicek or Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (possibly coupled with compounded Poisson jumps, JCIR), are tractable processes but have limited flexibility; they fail to replicate actual market curves. The deterministic shift extension of the latter (Hull-White or JCIR++) is a simple but yet efficient solution that is widely used by both academics and practitioners. However, the shift approach

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