The current financial crisis resonates with every American, regardless of their connection to the securities markets. Many struggle to understand how and why the American financial and securities markets collapsed last year. In essence, why did the regulators fail to prevent the collapse?...

We provide evidence suggesting that some hedge funds manipulate stock prices on critical reporting dates. Stocks in the top quartile of hedge fund holdings exhibit abnormal returns of 0.30% on the last day of the quarter and a reversal of 0.25% on the following day. A significant part of the...

Collective investments have become a very popular investment vehicle in South Africa because it is, among other things, transparent, liquid and easily accessible. Growing investor knowledge, good market returns and its suitability for diversification, which minimizes risk, also contributes to...

This Selected Issues paper for the Russian Federation discusses existing empirical efforts to measure the determinants of cross-country financial integration. Empirical studies that have adopted the gravity-model framework have found that it is generally successful in explaining bilateral...

Putting the pension system on a sustainable footing arguably remains the biggest challenge in Russia's economic policies. The debate about the policy options was hitherto constrained by the absence of general equilibrium analysis. This paper fills this gap by simulating their macroeconomic...

The Chinese pension system is highly fragmented and decentralized, with governance standards, pension fund management practices, their regulation and supervision varying considerably both across the funded components of the Chinese pension system and across provinces. This paper describes the...

This Selected Issues paper examines the reasons for the poor initial performance of the Compact Trust Fund (CTF) of Micronesia and the issues related to the governance framework. The design and recent implementation of the CTF raise concerns that Micronesia will still face a difficult transition...

A full assessment of Israel’s compliance with the Insurance Core Principles (ICPs) of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) is presented. The Minister of Finance bears the political responsibility for supervisory oversight of the Israeli insurance system. Nonlife...