The recent financial crisis has clearly demonstrated the exposure of defined contribution (DC) pension scheme members to extreme financial market risks. This paper argues that the government might offer DC plan members a minimum return guarantee, funded by risk based premia. Option pricing...

The process through which economic policy is conceived and decided cannot be simply described as the optimisation of a well-defined loss function subject to the constraints provided by a model of the economy. Even ignoring the forbidding difficulties of eliciting a stable and explicit loss...

We use detailed data on housing prices in Italy available for a large number of years and with a fine geographical breakdown to compute capital gains and losses on the most widespread asset among consumers, housing, and inquire whether changes in housing values affect consumption. We find that...