The J-Shape Of Performance Persistence Given Survivorship Bias

Darryll Hendricks, Jayendu Patel and Richard Zeckhauser

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 1997, vol. 79, issue 2, 161-166

Abstract: Performance may enhance survival probability. When it does, the induced lack of randomness challenges robust and unbiased inference. If survivors are sorted into two groups based on past performance, spurious persistence has been demonstrated if variance in performance is heterogeneous. However, as we show both theoretically and with simulations, if performance is categorized finely, the spurious persistence will be J - shaped; that is, at the bottom better performance in one period "predicts" worse performance for another period. We propose a simple t - test applied to the quadratic coefficient in a regression to distinguish between a spurious J - shape and monotonic patterns. Mutual funds, our example, exhibit the monotonically increasing pattern produced by true performance persistence. © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/003465397556575 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:79:y:1997:i:2:p:161-166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().