This paper illustrates how a third statistic from asset pricing models, the R-squared statistic, may have information that can help in portfolio construction. Using a traditional CAPM model in comparison to an 18-factor Arbitrage Pricing Style Model, a portfolio separation test is conducted. Portfolio returns and risk metrics are compared using…

This report is first in a series of informational briefings developed as part of "The Guardians Initiative: Reclaiming the Public Trust," an effort to educate and engage trustees as advocates on key issues in higher education. While the tone of public criticism of higher education has sharpened, public understanding about the sector's…

President Obama is right to draw attention to the soaring cost of a college education in America. However, his proposed solution will not only fail to fix the problem but is also likely to compound it by blunting the competition that is needed to shake up the world of higher education. President Obama proposes to slow tuition growth by…

Introduction: Our aim is to compare the advantages and problems of e-book acquisition identified in research literature to those experienced by two Swedish university libraries. Method: A literature review was used to identify the main issues related to acquisition of e-books by academic libraries. The data for comparison were collected through…

A heuristic approach to explaining of the Black-Scholes option pricing model in undergraduate classes is described. The approach draws upon the method of protocol analysis to encourage students to "think aloud" so that their mental models can be surfaced. It also relies upon extensive visualizations to communicate relationships that are…

Using store-level and aggregated Consumer Price Index data, we show that restaurant prices rise in response to minimum wage increases under several sources of identifying variation. We introduce a general model of employment determination that implies minimum wage hikes cause prices to rise in competitive labor markets but potentially fall in…

The extent to which community colleges in 10 Midwest states relied on 12 current funds revenue sources between 1990 and 2000 is presented in this study. Four models of funding were identified and evaluated. All models generated revenue in excess of the change in the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI), a measure of inflation over the period…

Hedonic models of the price of college to construct quality-adjusted net price indexes for U.S. four-year colleges were estimated. A 22 percent decline in the estimated price index is reported by adjusting for financial aid, while quality adjusting results lead to a smaller decline, for academic years 1990-91 to 1994-95.

Significant differences in the cost of living exist among different parts of the country and among different rural and urban counties within the same state. This paper develops a method for estimating current geographical differences in the cost of living index for all states for 1981-90. These estimates, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data,…

Observes that, before 1973, determining a valuation formula for option prices was an elusive goal of financial economics. Discusses Louis Bachelier's early twentieth-century work on the problem. Notes that Bachelier derived a normal distribution for stock price movements by modeling price changes in specific way. Reviews Bachelier's option pricing…

Strategic pricing is an important and exciting topic in industrial organization and the economics of strategy. A wide range of texts use what has become a standard version of the Milgrom and Roberts (1982a) limit-pricing model to convey the essential ideas of strategic pricing under incomplete information. In addition to providing a formal, but…

Proves price index (proportion of references within the last five years of literature) is not a pure function of the mean or median reference age, but a well-defined relation in the form of a typical cloud of points. Compares models for analyzing price index (decreasing exponential and lognormal aging) and explains cloud using results from…

This paper examines the particular problems involved in analyzing the costs of bilingual education and suggests that cost analysis of bilingual education requires a fundamentally different approach than that followed in other recent school finance studies. Focus of the discussion is the Intercultural Development Research Association's (IDRA)…

Efforts of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst illustrate the use of cost information in decision-making. The Instructional Cost Index can be used to determine the unit costs of instruction and, combined with information from an induced course load matrix system, can provide data on the costs of programs. (LBH)

This publication discusses a cost analysis study of bilingual education in Texas that sought to determine the per-pupil costs of a minimally adequate program that would correspond to the regular monolingual program funded under the state's foundation finance program. The study identified the essential costs of a model bilingual education program…