Betas Used by Professors: A Survey With 2,500 Answers

Abstract

This paper reports report 2,510 answers from professors from 65 countries and 934 institutions, 1,791 respondents use betas, but 107 of them do not justify the betas they use. About 97.3% of the professors justify the betas use regressions, webs, databases, textbooks, or papers, although many of them state that calculated betas "are poorly measured and have many problems". Only 0.9% of the professors justify the beta using exclusively personal judgement (named qualitative, common sense, intuitive, and logical magnitude betas by different professors).