This morning, I would like to give a few practical commentson capital adequacy from an insurance companyperspective. In doing so, I will present two views on capitaladequacy and capital allocation in the insurance industry.The first view is the regulatory perspective, that is, themotivations...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...

Advocates of fair value accounting believe that fair valuesprovide more relevant measures of assets, liabilities, andearnings than do historical costs. These advocates assertthat fair value accounting better reflects underlying economicvalues. The advantages of this method—and thecorresponding...

This paper analyzes a useful accounting framework that breaks down the current account to twocomponents: a composition effect and a growth effect.We show that past empirical evidence, which stronglysupports the growth effect as the main driver of current account dynamics, is misconceived. The...

Growth accounting consists of a set of calculations resulting in a measure ofoutput growth, a measure of input growth, and their difference, most commonlyreferred to as total factor productivity (TFP) growth. It can be performed atthe level of the plant, firm, industry, or aggregate economy.[...]