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220 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Negative / Null Result Report. 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

Firm-level climate sentiments, climate politics and implied cost of equity capital

Katsiaryna Salavei Bardos, Dev R. Mishra, Hyacinthe Somé · 2025 · Journal of Corporate Finance

In a sample of U.S. firms, we find strong evidence that firms' implied cost of equity is decreasing in a novel proxy of firm-level climate change sentiments of earnings call participants, supporting prior literature that shows investors demand higher returns from their investments in brown firms and lower returns from that in green firms. This effect, however, is particularly pronounced for the firm-years headquartered in the states experiencing higher than median per-capita energy related CO2 emissions, those headquartered in climate related disaster intensive counties and those headquartered

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Determinants of Green Energy Penetration in N-11 Countries: A Machine Learning Analysis

Najabat Ali, Md Reza Sultanuzzaman · 2026 · Energies

This study investigates the determinants of green energy penetration in the Next Eleven (N-11) economies over the period 2000–2022, with a particular focus on the roles of foreign direct investment (FDI), green transition, governance quality, industrial growth, and urbanization. The primary objective of the study is to assess how investment flows, structural transformation, and institutional capacity jointly shape the adoption of renewable energy in fast-growing emerging economies. To achieve this goal, the study employs a second-generation panel econometric and machine-learning framework that

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

When Do Low-Frequency Measures Really Measure Effective Spreads? Evidence from Equity and Foreign Exchange Markets

Mohammad R. Jahan‐Parvar, Filip Žikeš · 2023 · Review of Financial Studies

Abstract We present evidence that several popular low-frequency measures of effective spread suffer from a volatility-induced bias and that volatility is the primary driver of the variation of these liquidity proxies. Using data for U.S. equities and major foreign exchange rates, we show that the bias arises when the effective spread is small relative to volatility. We document that the bias has become more acute over time and show that volatility-biased measures fail to replicate some well-known results in empirical finance. We conclude by providing guidance on the choice of low-frequency mea

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Government effectiveness on environmental degradation in developing countries

Rong Yuan, Tajul Ariffin Masron, Yujie Chen et al. · 2025 · International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology

Abstract The alarming rate of environmental degradation worldwide has prompted a renewed focus on government effectiveness as an essential factor affecting environmental quality. Few studies have demonstrated the role of government effectiveness in environmental degradation under the influence of economic development. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the effect of government effectiveness and how it impacts environmental degradation using panel data from 61 regions from 2007 to 2021 and the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator. The results show that improving government ef

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Bridging digital innovation and energy justice: The role of artificial intelligence in advancing energy equity

Oxana Kirichok, Yuliia Orlovska, G.S. Zhanseitova et al. · 2025 · Environmental Economics

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstract Global progress toward universal access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy has stalled, with over two billion people still lacking access to clean cooking, and affordability pressures are rising. AI is emerging as an energy-intensive technology and a potential enabler of more equitable energy systems. This paper assesses whether AI vibrancy contributes to advancing energy equity across countries while accounting for differences in economic capacity. The study employs a balanced panel of 36 countries from 2017 to 2023 (252 observations), draw

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

From Fossil Dependence on Sustainability: The Effects of Energy Transition, Green Growth, and Financial Inclusion on Environmental Degradation in the MENA Region

Sami S. Omar, Wagdi M. S. Khalifa, Tolga Öz · 2025 · Energies

Amid growing environmental concerns and an increasing push for sustainable development, countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have taken proactive steps toward green growth, energy transition, and technological innovation. As a result, this study examines the effects of green growth, energy transition, technological innovation, financial inclusion, and urbanization on environmental sustainability in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Moreover, this study breaks new ground by exposing the hidden environmental costs of financial inclusion, urbanization, and tec

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Reconciling fiscal decentralization, environmental protection expenditures, and stringent regulations with the ecological priorities of the European Union

Elma Šatrović, Oluwatoyin Abidemi Somoye, Banji Rildwan Olaleye et al. · 2025 · Frontiers in Environmental Science

This study elucidates how fiscal decentralization affects environmental sustainability, moderating the role of environmental policy stringency in the selected European Union (EU) countries between 1995 and 2020. In addition, economic upturn, import diversification, and environmental protection expenditures are utilized as control variables. The empirical findings of the Method of the Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) disclosed that the environmental policy stringency and environmental protection expenditures help the EU achieve ecological priorities. In addition, import diversification also s

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Income Convergence in Europe: The Role of Institutions and Structural Factors

Goran Lalić, Dragana Trifunović · 2026 · Social Sciences

This paper examines income convergence in Europe by jointly analyzing European Union member states and Western Balkan economies over the period 2004–2023. While classical growth theory predicts that poorer economies should grow faster than richer ones, empirical evidence for Europe remains mixed, particularly when institutional and structural heterogeneity is taken into account. Using panel data techniques, the study tests for absolute and conditional β-convergence and complements this analysis with an assessment of σ-convergence. The results provide strong evidence of absolute income converge

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

The Pressure Is on: How Geopolitical Tensions Impact Institutional Fiscal and External Stability Responses

António Afonso, José Alves, João Jalles et al. · 2026 · Scottish Journal of Political Economy

ABSTRACT We examine how geopolitical risks (GPR) affect fiscal (FS) and external sustainability (ES) across 27 European Union economies over 2001Q4–2022Q3. We apply a two‐step strategy: first, estimating time‐varying FS and ES coefficients…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Threshold Effects on South Africa’s Renewable Energy–Economic Growth–Carbon Dioxide Emissions Nexus: A Nonlinear Analysis Using Threshold-Switching Dynamic Models

Luyanda Majenge, Sakhile Mpungose, Simiso Msomi · 2025 · Energies

The transition of South Africa from coal-dependent energy systems to renewable energy alternatives presents economic and environmental trade-off complexities that require empirical investigation. This study employed threshold-switching dynamic models, NARDL analysis, and threshold Granger causality tests to investigate nonlinear relationships between renewable energy generation, economic growth, and carbon dioxide emissions in South Africa from 1980 to 2023. The threshold-switching dynamic models revealed critical structural breakpoints: a 56.4% renewable energy threshold for carbon dioxide em

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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

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

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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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Talents from Abroad. Foreign Managers and Productivity in the United Kingdom

Dimitrios Exadaktylos, Massimo Riccaboni, Armando Rungi · 2020 · arXiv

In this paper, we test the contribution of foreign management on firms' competitiveness. We use a novel dataset on the careers of 165,084 managers employed by 13,106 companies in the United Kingdom in the period 2009-2017. We find that domestic manufacturing firms become, on average, between 7% and 12% more productive after hiring the first foreign managers, whereas foreign-owned firms register no significant improvement. In particular, we test that previous industry-specific experience is the primary driver of productivity gains in domestic firms (15.6%), in a way that allows the latter to ca

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Conditioning on a Volatility Proxy Compresses the Apparent Timescale of Collective Market Correlation

Yuda Bi, Vince D Calhoun · 2026 · arXiv

We address the attribution problem for apparent slow collective dynamics: is the observed persistence intrinsic, or inherited from a persistent driver? For the leading eigenvalue fraction $ψ_1=λ_{\max}/N$ of S\&P 500 60-day rolling correlation matrices ($237$ stocks, 2004--2023), a VIX-coupled Ornstein--Uhlenbeck model reduces the effective relaxation time from $298$ to $61$ trading days and improves the fit over bare mean reversion by $Δ$BIC$=109$. On the decomposition sample, an informational residual of $\log(\mathrm{VIX})$ alone retains most of that gain ($Δ$BIC$=78.6$), whereas a mechanic

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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

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

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

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

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

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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