Is there any justification for investing in managed mutual funds, or are managed funds for suckers, as indexing advocates argue? We answer this question by looking at a long time span of real fund returns (27 years) for one specific company (Vanguard) that is notable for its low fees on managed...

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether and how much the U.S. stock market is overvalued, leading some economic gurus to suggest that foreign markets may be good investments. We ask whether this is the case and apply the Gordon formula to predict future real rates of return on...

For the steel import quota bill of 1999, our answer to the question posed in the title is that each word in the Congressional Record costs $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry. Consequently, our answer is "Yes."

Do enhanced index funds beat traditional ones? The major companies that offer the new enhanced index international mutual funds are Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), RAFI, and WisdomTree. A major provider of traditional international index funds is DFA. We compare various enhanced international...

In an overlapping generations model, capital and labor produce two tradeable goods. A kleptocratic government spends the tariff revenue. Trade liberalization, which lowers the relative price of the importable to the private sector, benefits the retired generation if and only if the relative...

We consider an economy (e.g. Chile 1973-83 or modern Turkey) with a minimum wage sector and a free sector, and a tax on labor earnings. We ask can a minimum wage hike raise employment and economic efficiency?

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...

Investigating style-adjusted performance is important for an investor who has selected the desired style and wishes to know which fund or company or portfolio would have provided the best performance within that style. Looking at the entire portfolios provided to clients by different companies...