The link between pension reform, and capital market development, has become a perennial question, raised every time the potential benefits, and pre-conditions of pension reform are discussed. The author asks two questions. First, what are the basic"feasibility"pre-conditions for the successful...

Institutional investors comprise pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds. Should a country promote their creation if it lacks well-developed securities markets? The answer to this question, says the author, varies by type of investor. He argues that private pension funds and...

The authors address the trading strategies of mutual funds in emerging markets. The data set they develop permits analyses of these strategies at the level of individual portfolios. A methodologically novel feature of their analysis: they disentangle the behavior of fund managers from that of...

Leading financial economists have proposed the use of international asset swaps (Merton 1990, Bodie and Merton 2002) as a way of efficiently achieving international diversification without eroding the level of foreign exchange reserves and weakening local market development. International asset...

One of the strongest objections to personal pension plans is that they transfer investment risk to individual workers, who are then exposed to the vagaries of equity and bond markets. Using historical United States data, the authors investigate the impact of the volatility of investment returns...

The authors explain the features of an array of futures contracts and their basic pricing relationships and describe a few applications to show how investors and risk managers can use these contracts. Futures - and derivatives generally - allow economic agents to fine-tune the structure of their...

The authors examine the architecture, elements of market design, and the products traded in derivatives exchanges around the world. The core function of a derivatives exchange is to facilitate the transfer of risk among economic agents by providing mechanisms to enhance liquidity and facilitate...

The author examines the implications of demutualization of financial exchanges for their roles as self-regulatory organizations. Many regulators and exchanges believe that conflicts of interest increase when exchanges convert to for-profit businesses. Demutualization also changes the nature of...

The oil sector is critical to Ecuador's economy, contributing about 17 percent to the country's GDP. Ecuador began exporting crude oil in 1972 and over the past two and a half decades oil has become the country's most important sector. It is controlled by the government through the public...

The authors provide a detailed study of the Swiss pension system, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. The unfunded public pillar is highly redistributive. It has near universal coverage, a low dispersion of benefits (the maximum public pension is twice the minimum), and no ceiling on...