Essays on the emiprical properties of stock and mutual fund returns

Survivorship bias influences statistical inference in Finance. Through a series of Monte Carlo simulations in the style of Brown, Goetzmann, Ibbotson, and Ross {1992), we study the sampling distribution of the mean return, standard deviation, beta, Fama & MacBeth {1973) t-statistic, and Jegadeesh & Titman (1993) momentum strategy return in progressively truncated datasets. Survivor-biased datasets have higher mean returns, lower return standard deviations and lower betas than the full sample. Beta has no explanatory power even when the CAPM is true, a finding virtually unaffected by survivorship bias. Returns to a momentum strategy are positive even when stock idiosyncratic returns are serially and cross-sectionally uncorrelated, but survivorship bias overestimates the returns and underestimates the beta of the strategy.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Taylor, Jonathan David, 1969-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Andrew W. Lo.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9043

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9043