Paper Title
A Meta-Analysis in Finance

Abstract
A tremendous amount of academic papers have been published in finance over the past several decades. Important topics include internal capital market, corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investment, mergers and acquisitions, and so forth. Many researchers have attempted to figure out whether variables pertaining to these subjects have a positive relationship with corporate financial performance. However, it is not easy to synthesize empirical results of extant research, since papers are so different in terms of methodology used, research period, measurement of key variables, data set, etc. A meta-analysis is an excellent tool to aggregate a variety of heterogeneous results and comprehend the overall picture scientifically. This method is far better than a synthesis paper produced by a single person due to the problem of researcher bias. It is also better than a voting method since it takes care of the size and variance of impacts. This paper investigates the possibility of using meta-analysis in finance area and discusses issues regarding statistical test, bias correction, small sample problems, data collection, and so on. In addition to the discussion of the meta-analysis per se, we also provide an example of meta-analysis applied in one of finance areas, socially responsible investments. Keywords- Meta-analysis, effect size, fixed-effect model, random-effect model, socially responsible investments