Successive reforms enacted since the 1990s have dramatically changed Europe’s pensions landscape. This paper tries to assess the impact of recent reforms on the ability of systems to alleviate poverty and maintain living standards, using estimates of pension wealth for a number of hypothetical...

The balance between private and public sectors in welfare activity in the UK has been documented by Burchardt (1997) and Smithies (2005) for three time periods; 1979/1980, 1995/1996 and 1999/2000. The existing evidence suggested that a welfare mix has previously been in existence but that the...

This paper examines the decline of National Insurance in Britain, as witnessed by its declining share of all social security spending and the steady dilution of the ¿contributory principle¿ on which it was originally based. It argues that this decline is not an accident: under governments of...

This article outlines the recommendations of the UK Pensions Commission, and the data and analysis on which they were based, including projections of demographic change, trends in private pension saving, and evolution of the state pension system. The Commission concluded that without reform,...

Auerbach et al. (1995), document the dramatic postwar increase in the annuitization of the resources of America's elderly. Gokhale et al. (1996) suggest that greater annuitization may explain the significant postwar rise in the consumption propensity of the elderly out of remaining lifetime...

This paper analyses how entry by an international bank into a developing economy affects the credit market equilibrium. It offers a novel explanation of how a foreign entrant overcomes asymmetric information problems, and complements extant hard vs. soft information based theories of credit...

Convergence concerns the poor catching up with the rich|if not instan- taneously, then at least having a tendency to do so. When poor and rich here refer to entire economies, then whether convergence occurs is traditionally viewed as just a side consequence of a more central ques- tion, namely...

This report presents two of our investigations: one is to obtain an accurate forecast for the corporate bankruptcy; the other is to obtain a physical default intensity. Both investigations were based on the hazard model, using only firm-specific accounting variables as predictors. Different...

We propose a rational theory of momentum and reversal based on delegated portfolio management. A competitive investor can invest through an index fund or an active fund run by a manager with unknown ability. Following a negative cashflow shock to assets held by the active fund, the investor...

Probably not. First, allowing the probabilities attached to the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected by the data and requires a very high level of Relative Risk Aversion(RRA) in order to rationalize the stock market risk premium....