This dissertation consists of two essays in asset allocation In the first essay  I measure the value of active money management I explore this issue by comprehensively examining the parametric rule proposed by Brandt  Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2009) (the BSV rule) out-of-sample for portfolio selection among 3516 stocks in CRSP and comparing this rule to the mean-variance (MV) rule and the naïve 1/N rule recently advocated by DeMiguel  Garlappi and Uppal (2009)