> I should also point out that "could be due to chance" isn't in itself very interesting. That means that with the methods and data the authors happened to use,

> I should also point out that "could be due to chance" isn't in itself very interesting. That means that with the methods and data the authors happened to use, they didn't happen to find a statistically significant effect, and while that could be because they don't have an effect it could also be that the tools used to look for one were simply not up to par. My wife wrote had an analytical project when she was working on her masters in accounting. The thesis was correlation between CEO compensation vs Stock market performance. After two months of crunching data, she came to the realization that there was absolutely NO cofrelation. She was distraught by her data thinking she made a mistake so we re-crunched the numbers, attempted to find better samples data (larger range of top tier and lower tier companies), excluding financial companies from the data because of 2008 market and stock price, etc. At the end, we realized that CEOs compensation has very little effect on stock market price over X amount of time. If you you can rationalize that stock price = CEO performance, then this would be agreeable with the article itself.