In the wake of the financial crisis considerable momentum has built up behind proposals to extend central counterparty (CCP) clearing in the over-the-counter derivatives markets. However, implementation is proving complex. This paper argues that one cause of this complexity is that the public...

Large sections of the UK population are failing to make adequate provision for their retirement, and one area where provision is notably poor is amongst people working for small and medium sized businesses. We use information gathered from interviews with individuals from a wide range of...

Although now forgotten, organized markets in commodities like grain, cotton, sugar, coffee and spices became firmly established in London and Liverpool in the nineteenth century. These markets were stimulated by the rising volume of international trade, as Britain became the first industrial...

This paper examines the performance of personal pensions (exempt unit trusts) in the UK 1980-2000. Unitised personal pension schemes are a type of mutual fund that is constituted as a contractual savings scheme, whose value can only be accessed at retirement. By studying the performance of these...

This paper estimates the implied stochastic process of the volatility of the Swiss market index (SMI) from the prices of options written on it. A GARCH(1,1) model is shown to be a good parameterization of the process. Then, using the GARCH option pricing model of Duan (1991), the implied...