BACKGROUND An estimated one fifth of all U.S. adult smokers receive health benefits through insurance plans administered by Taft-Hartley Health and Welfare Funds. Most funds do not offer comprehensive tobacco-cessation services to fund participants despite evidence that doing so would be cost effective and save lives. PURPOSE This paper examines the decision-making processes of Minnesota-base...

In this paper, we apply nonlinear techniques (Self-Organizing Maps, k-nearest neighbors and the k-means algorithm) to evaluate the official Spanish mutual funds classification. The methodology that we propose allows us to identify which mutual funds are misclassified in the sense that they have historical performances which does not conform with the investment objectives established in their of...

The investment of mutual funds which investors are often required evaluating the investment strategies according to their own subjective preferences in terms of numerical values from various criteria. This situation can be regarded as a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The purpose of this study attempts to propose an alternative approach, fuzzy multiple criteria decision ...

Presumably, hedge fund managers pursue unique strategies, because they possess innovative ideas and superior investment skills, while less skilled managers are more likely to herd and follow publicly known investment strategies. For investors, knowing how innovative and skillful their managers are is thus extremely important but difficult because of the opaque nature of hedge fund operations. I...

We perform a detailed asymptotic analysis of the equilibrium behavior of the asset prices, wealth size and portfolio weights in complete markets equilibria, with long-lived funds. In equilibrium, the fund with the (closest to) log preference will dominate the other funds in size, in the long-run, with probability one. On the other hand, two funds on the opposite sides of the log preference will...

This paper examines whether country mutual funds respond differently to the up– and down-side conditions in its underlying risk factors, namely, return on the US market, the foreign benchmark and the foreign exchange market. Our sample includes 15 CEFs and 19 ETFs that are traded in the US financial markets and designed to mimic performances of certain foreign country benchmarks. Using a 3–fact...

We investigate the case for Bordeaux and Rhone wine as an investment. The raw data analysed comprises of approx. 335,000 observations of wine sales prices and is analysed using the repeat sales regression method. General Red Bordeaux and Rhone wine indices are constructed for the period January 1996 – January 2007, which are compared with each other , with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA...

Classi#cation can be useful in giving a synthetic and informative description of contexts characterized by high degrees of complexity. Di3erent approaches could be adopted to tackle the classi#cation problem: statistical tools may contribute to increase the degree of con#dence in the classi#cation scheme. A classi#cation algorithm for mutual funds style analysis is proposed, which combines di3e...

This paper examines asset allocation dynamics of hedge funds through conducting optimal changepoint test on an asset class factor model. Based on the average F-test and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), we find that more dynamic hedge funds exhibit significantly better quality than less dynamic funds, signaled by lower return volatility, stricter share restrictions, and high water mark ...

This paper examines problems in the CRSP Survivor Bias Free U.S. Mutual Fund Database ~CRSP, 1998! and compares returns contained in it to those in Morningstar. The CRSP database has an omission bias that has the same effects as survivorship bias. Although all mutual funds are listed in CRSP, return data is missing for many and the characteristics of these funds differ from the populations. The...