Now 23, Guerrero became the first member of her family to go to college and last year graduated from UC-Irvine.

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Like the UC-Irvine iPod study before it, the ADBI analysis found that just a tiny fraction of the cost of producing the iPhone is Chinese value-added.

FORBES: Lies, Damned Lies, and Trade Statistics

Following in the footsteps of a groundbreaking and widely-cited 2007 UC-Irvine study, which disaggregated the components of a Chinese-assembled Apple iPod and assigned its constituent value to the companies and countries responsible for their production, two researchers at the Asian Development Bank Institute applied a similar analysis to the Apple iPhone.

FORBES: Lies, Damned Lies, and Trade Statistics

Sun and co-authors Lu Zheng of UC Irvine and Ashley Wang of the Federal Reserve studied the returns of some 5, 000 hedge funds from 1994 to 2011, adjusting for the funds' stock and bond exposure, currency bets, credit spreads and other factors that could account for performance.

WSJ: Upside: Protecting Your Portfolio From a Downturn

Last spring, however, Gloria Mark at UC Irvine and collaborating U.S. Army scientists produced another intriguing study involving e-mail.

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Of course, hedge-fund and mutual-fund managers can use different strategies to try to beat the market, so the findings of the UC Irvine and Fed researchers might not translate to mutual funds.

WSJ: Upside: Protecting Your Portfolio From a Downturn