The roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented by minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills....

With U.S. multinational enterprises playing increasingly important roles in the global economy, it is important to understand the efficiency of their capital budgeting decisions. We examine an unbalanced panel of 332 U.S. firms from 1992-2000. Using the deviation of a firm's estimated marginal...

This paper examines the effectiveness of multinational enterprises capital budgeting decisions as compared to the decisions of purely domestic enterprises. This is an important question because of multinationals role in allocating capital globally. Answering this question may also shed light on...

This essay examines the role of data and program-code archives in making economic research 'replicable.' Replication of published results is recognized as an essential part of the scientific method. Yet, historically, both the 'demand for' and 'supply of' replicable results in economics has been...

Sharpe's (1966) portfolio performance ratio, the ratio of the portfolio?s expected return to its standard deviation, is a very well known tool for comparing portfolios. However, due to the presence of random denominators in the definition of the ratio, the sampling distribution of the Sharpe...

Numerous examples show that some econometric software packages contain serious flaws, and that users cannot safely assume that their software is accurate. A brief survey of the fundamentals of computer arithmetic discusses the sources of numerical error and emphasizes that computer arithmetic is...