The Foundations of Pension Finance presents in two authoritative volumes a selection of the most important published articles on systems of retirement income provision – an area that is of vital importance for the future of the economy in general and the financial system in particular.

Using data from the US, UK, Japan and Canada, this paper provides evidence on the benefits to an economy from "multiple avenues of intermediation". The overall conclusion is that the existence of active securities markets alongside banks is indeed beneficial to the stability of corporate...

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the UK and German economies. It is found that they do have...