Financing retirement benefits is probably the most significant fiscal challenge that governments in industrial economies will be facing in the next few decades. Social security reform has therefore become an important public policy issue for many countries and various reform proposals have been...

Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or...