This paper compares the risk and return of investing in equity mutual funds provided by the world's two largest mutual fund families: Fidelity and Vanguard over a long horizon. We believe this will help guide investors; this study is an example of the calculations that mutual fund companies...

Jared Kizerís analysis indicates the return to stock-picking skills is not enough to offset the additional transactions costs of a managed portfolio. Thus the superior performance of Vanguardís managed portfolio was due entirely to its tendency to overweight small stocks and value stocks...

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 slightly binding minimum wage simultaneously raise tax revenue, employment, and economic efficiency?" We answer "Yes, if the elasticity of demand...

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...

Sebastian Edwards and Alejandra Cox Edwards in their analysis of the Chilean economic liberalization argue that both capital inflows and outflows may have harmed the Chilean economy. They model the Chilean economy as using labor and fixed factors to produce traded and non-traded goods subject to...

Several authors have argued that if exporting firms anticipate a voluntary export restriction in a future period, and they expect VERs to be allocated in proportion to past exports, then they have an incentive to dump in the earlier period. In this paper we ask: How does a regime characterized...

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.