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...

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...

This paper analyses optimal irreversible investment policy when profits are subject to a multiplicative geometric Brownian motion shock. The marginal product of capital is increasing initially and decreasing thereafter. In the latter range, optimal policy is familiar: capacity is added gradually...

This paper analyses the design of carbon markets in time (i.e., intertemporally). It is part of a twin set of papers that ask, starting from first principles, what an optimal global carbon market would look like by around 2030. Our focus is on firm-level cap-and-trade systems, although much of...