Is the US stock market overvalued? I use Shiller's CAPE to predict the return of investing in the S&P500 index. Siegel argues that the recent fall in the share of earnings that are paid out as dividends has biased downwards predictions from the CAPE. I offer a solution to the problem of reduced...

Previous articles on the transfer problem pay scant attention to the problems caused by the distortionary taxation that extracts the gift from the donor nation or the cut in distortionary taxation that bestows the gift to the recipient nation. When combined with inflexibility in the real wage...

R. Ron Elmer is running for Treasurer of the State of North Carolina. He is aware that the high expenses and high turnover associated with active management of portfolios reduce returns. Part of Elmer's platform is to replace active management of stock mutual funds, private equity, real estate...

This paper compares Vanguard and Fidelity on 21 comparable funds in five aspects: performance, tax-efficiency, cost, diversification, benchmark and tracking precision. The conclusions are as follows: first, for pre-tax return, the difference between Vanguard and Fidelity is small, but Vanguard...

From January 2019 Duke employees who are paid monthly have a changed set of mutual funds to choose from in their Duke University Faculty and Staff Retirement Plan. Which mutual funds are good choices? We compare the new lineup of funds with the Vanguard funds that have been cut from the...

This chapter evaluates the returns of the domestic equity funds of three major American companies: Vanguard, Fidelity, and Dimensional Fund Advisors relative to benchmarks using the Fama-French factors from January 2001 through December 2018. We also present Sharpe's (1992) style analysis...

Two common views are that a country cannot develop without a strong manufacturing base and that trade restrictions are essential to facilitate the development of that strong manufacturing base and thus spur economic growth. We ask: • Does a strong manufacturing share of GDP facilitate economic...

In this paper we analyze the performance of China's open-ended mutual funds, using the data of 467 open-ended mutual funds from 60 fund families from January 2010 through April 2015. A paradox emerges. High expense ratios are associated with better performance. Unsurprisingly, in light of...

Andrew Lo in his book, Adaptive Markets, advocates an investment product that he names a “dynamic index.” He has facilitated the operation of a variant of this dynamic indexation, “dynamic allocation,” by founding a company, AlphaSimplex. Another dynamic investment is GMO’s Benchmark...