Economic researchers are rarely able to conduct surveys or design experiments to obtain evidence with which to assess theories or hypotheses but must rely on information, such as the national income accounting data, compiled by the government bureau of statistics. The bureau revises its national income estimates as more information becomes available or as a result of changes in methods of estimation or minor changes in definitions or classifications. The purpose of this paper is to show that the correlation structures and the autoregressive moving average representations of a number of Australian quarterly time series extracted from the income accounts are relatively insensitive to data revision. The same is true of the cross correlation functions between the pre-whitened series.

The purpose of this study is to measure and evaluate the objectives, risk, and return of 123 American mutual funds using monthly returns in the period 1960–1969. The paper considers five questions: How were stated fund objectives related to risk and return, as measured over the subsequent decade? How did funds of various objectives perform in terms of return and return-to-risk measures? Did average excess return increase with risk? Was the return-to-risk performance of the average mutual fund better or worse than that of the stock market as a whole? How did the slope of the mutual fund line of returns versus beta compare to the capital market line; i.e., did funds at one end of the risk spectrum appear to “outperform” those at the other end?

John G. McDonald, Session Topic: Individual Investors and Mutual Funds: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 29, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, New York, New York, December 28-30, 1973 (May, 1974), pp. 434-438

John G. McDonald, Bertrand Jacquillat, Maurice Nussenbaum, Dividend, Investment and Financing Decisions: Empirical Evidence on French Firms, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 5 (Dec., 1975), pp. 741-755