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...

We evaluate the performance of 51 mutual fund families based on a study of their diversified US managed mutual funds over an 11 year period and explore the determinants of performance gross of published expenses. We find that mutual fund families which charge loads, high expenses to their most...

How successful are stock market predictions? We explore one set of easily accessible predictions by a respected firm, GMO. Specifically, we evaluate how effective GMO's predicted stock returns have been in guiding investors from June 2000 through March 2014. We find that the predictions have...

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...