Notes the popularity of index funds with US investors, refers to research on fund performance compared with indexes and presents a study comparing daily returns of S&P 500 index funds with the index itself. Explains the methodology and presents the results, which show that the funds “fall well...

Reports that under a third of the increasing numbers of US citizens needing long‐term care (LTC) in a nursing home pay their own fees; and that Medicaid (health programme for the poor) meets over half of LTC costs. Describes the rules applied to qualify for Medicaid LTC payments, the growth of...

Explains the new US tax rules for calculating the required minimum distributions from employer‐sponsored qualified retirement plans, 403(b) plans and individual retirement accounts, pointing out that when the owner of a tax‐deferred retirement account dies the beneficiary of the fund becomes...

Reports that few Americans plan financially for their retirement and outlines the possible strategies for doing so, referring to relevant research, e.g. company sponsored pension plans, individual retirement accounts and dependence on social security. Surveys students before and after financial...

Notes US efforts to make documents easier to read and reviews previous research on readability. Presents a study of the readability of the investment objective sections of two mutual fund prospectuses, using a sample of college students, the Cloze Readability Procedure and the Flesch readability...

Reviews previous research on the efficiency and performance of financial institutions and uses Siems and Barr’s (1998) data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the relative productive efficiency of US commercial banks 1984‐1998. Explains the methodology, discusses the input and...

Builds on the work of Damodaran (1993) and Brisley and Theobald (19967) on measuring the speed with which stock markets convert information into price changes by using a simpler model of the price adjustment coefficient and applying it to 1988‐1966 data from the Hong Kong, US and Japanese...

Outlines the characteristics of Japanese keiretsu (vertically integrated firms interlinked through industrial groups) and reviews the history of financial keiretsu and associated research. Compares the performance of Japanese and US banks 1989‐2000; and examines Japanese bank profit inefficiency...

This paper reports on some of the results obtained from three contemporaneous in‐depth studies conducted with multinational corporations in the UK, the US and Germany. It focuses on the organisation of foreign exchange risk management, in particular the goals of exchange risk management, the...

This paper examines whether financial buyers are more likely to initiate takeovers of inefficient firms. We show that they indeed are and thus conclude that takeovers by financial buyers play a potentially beneficial role in the allocation of corporate assets in the US. economy. Our analysis of...