Are you really Bernie Black? Wow. I didn’t think I’d see a tenured chair professor from Kellogg posting on econjobrumor.
As one of the authors of this project, a few comments:
(i) we can't make you believe that we prespecified our research design before running outcomes, but we were in fact quite rigorous about this. The results will be what they will be. We already know some of them, but let me not give away that part of the story quite yet.
(ii) We agree with the comment that Chu, Hirshleifer and Ma is a market microstructure paper, where non-null results are more plausible. That said, if someone wants to try to replicate it (or another of the more than 30 Reg SHO papers), we'll be happy to share our sample. We can't take them all on.
(iii) We did not forget to mention it, please see Appendix 1 to the research plan, which lists the Reg SHO papers we knew about at the time, including this one. We have found a couple of new ones since, then, but if we have in fact missed some, please tell us (bblack@northwestern.edu).
(iv) and also tell us if you have favorites that you find especially implausible. For my money, He and Tian on patenting is among them. this was planned to be a one-year experiment. Does anyone really this it affected patents? I sure don't. And what is the theory behind why increased short-selling should *reduce* managerial myopia anyway?
Bernie Black