For the steel import quota bill of 1999, each word in the Congressional Record costs $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry. Consequently, our answer is "Yes, talk is cheap!"

Recently in the Southern Economic Journal Palivos and Yip marry real and monetary analysis to provide an intriguing new argument for protection. Is this an idea which international agencies like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank should educate their member countries about? The...

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 the spring of 2000, two books predicted a substantial fall in the S&P500 Index. Robert Shiller's <I>Irrational Exuberance</I> found that, historically, a high price earnings ratio, with real earnings averaged over 10 years, accurately predicts a low real rate of return from investing in the S&P500...</i>

This paper is a short, non-technical exposition of the political economy of protection. It asks how do political forces operate to generate protection, and what determines the magnitude and form that protection takes.

Is John Bogle right that Vanguardís index and managed funds are comparable and by his example that investors should hold both? Each Vanguard managed fund produces the same return as the tracking basket of Vanguardís indexed funds plus a differential, a. If a, is positive the managed fund is...

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...

Each month, GMO publishes on the web its predictions of the real rate of return for various asset styles over the next seven years. Its web library also retains its quarterly predictions, dating back to the end of the second quarter of 2000. I ask whether these predictions are accurate. My...

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...