Passive index investing involves the low cost strategy of investing in a fund that replicates or, more often, tracks a market index. Enhanced indexation uses the returns of an index as a reference point and aims at outperforming this index. The intuition behind enhanced indexing is that market...

In this paper we derive a new measure of openness—trade potential index—that quantifies potential gains from trade as a simple function of data. Using a standard multicountry trade model, we measure openness by a country's potential welfare gain from moving to a world with frictionless...

We investigate the long-term performance of firms added to or deleted from the Hang Seng Index from 1986 to 2008. The stocks newly deleted from the Hang Seng Index have abnormal returns over a 5-year holding period and the newly added stocks do not. The deleted stocks outperform the added...

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence – including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles – indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our US index spikes...

Using listings data, we construct a new repeat-sales house price index that describes house values at the contract date when the price is determined rather than the closing date when the property is transferred. We show that this difference in timing helps explain several puzzles about house...

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian factor analysis model with the purpose of serving as an alternate approach to calculating the UNDP's Human Development Index, as well as providing a general methodology which can be used to augment existing indices or build new ones. In addition to addressing...

Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

This paper implements a liquidity measure, "Liquidity Mismatch Index (LMI)," to gauge the mismatch between the market liquidity of assets and the funding liquidity of liabilities. We construct the LMIs for 2882 bank holding companies during 2002-2014 and investigate the time-series and...

We develop a new approach to measuring the cost of living for constant elasticity of substitution (CES) preferences. Our approach allows for demand shocks for individual goods (to rationalize micro data) while preserving a money-metric expenditure function (to compare the cost of living over...