Do individual investors understand Social Security and its overseas counterparts?

Introduction

As we emphasized in earlier Math Drudge blogs (May 2014 and July 2014), individual investors are not very well equipped, and certainly not very effective, in managing their own investments, or in making other key financial decisions.

U.S. 401(k) accounts, and their equivalents elsewhere, are a particular problem. According to the 2014 DALBAR report, over the past 20 years the average “equity fund” investor achieved an average 5.02% annualized return, which is 4.2% less than the 9.22% than he/she could have achieved by simply investing funds in an S&P500 index-tracking fund. Investors in “fixed income funds” did more poorly

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Three of the all-time top ten SSRN Econometrics:Math papers are from the MAFFIA

The Social Science Research Network’s Econometrics: Mathematical Methods and Programming eJournal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts in the area of mathematical methods applied to econometrics. The journal maintains a list of the All Time Top Ten Papers of the journal, based on total download counts from the journal’s SSRN website from January 2, 1997 through the current date. The current top ten list is shown below, together with download counts as of June 3, 2015. These are selected out of a current total of 4,201 papers.

We note with some measure of satisfaction that three papers from this list,

Continue reading Three of the all-time top ten SSRN Econometrics:Math papers are from the MAFFIA