Campbell Harvey

Campbell Harvey is a professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business who coined the term "factor zoo" to describe the proliferation of published factors in academic finance — many of which he argues are statistical artifacts rather than genuine risk premia. His research on data mining bias and multiple testing in finance has been influential in how academics and practitioners evaluate factor research. Harvey also developed research on the inverted yield curve as a reliable US recession predictor and has contributed to cryptoasset research. He served as editor of the Journal of Finance. His call for higher statistical significance thresholds (a t-statistic of at least 3.0 rather than the conventional 2.0) for newly proposed factors has reshaped peer review standards in empirical finance and prompted a replication crisis conversation that continues to push the field toward greater rigor and out-of-sample validation.