Chemicals, equipment, machinery parts. It’s not sexy stuff. Certainly not as cool as games consoles, image sensors and flash memory chips. But who needs sexy when you can have excellent returns on your portfolio of tech stocks. That’s what JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Japan Technology Fund did. It went for the mundane and posted a 107 percent return in the ...

Seven years ago, the US led an effort to address a problem facing governments everywhere. Each year, people manage to avoid paying an estimated $2.5 trillion in income tax — a giant sum that could be used to combat poverty, update infrastructure or lower tax rates for law-abiding citizens. Now, however, the US is becoming one of the world’s best ...

Monopoly power is a hot topic of economic debate. Economists are starting to ask whether increasing industrial concentration is choking off productivity growth, reducing capital investment, throttling or deterring would-be entrepreneurs, raising consumer prices, and reducing the share of national income flowing to workers. This is a good and important effort. But it’s also possible that with all the attention ...