In a choice model of risky assets the role of risk aversion is analyzed. The measure of risk preference comes from a direct subjective survey question and it is considered as an imperfect information about the true risk attitude of investors. Misclassification between the true and the observed...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

It has been the author's privilege in recent years to personally visit with a number of nationally recognized retirement industry gurus. Generally speaking, these discussions have tended to identify two obstacles as blocking the implementation of any corporate strategy designed to retire workers...

Before the February 20th, 2008 LaRue decision by the United States Supreme Court, employee benefit plan participants who sued plan fiduciaries for investment losses faced near insurmountable legal hurdles. In LaRue the Court removed most of these hurdles, and may have opened floodgates releasing...

In the emerging field of behavioral finance, including human behavior aspects and implications of cognitive phsychology and anthropology in decisions are considered. The formulated hypotheses were tested by way of 400 questionairres answered by students enrolled in MBA programs. The principal...

Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. Weaknesses in the corporate structure of some Asian countries have been...

According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the slang phrase monkey on my back refers to a burdensome personal problem, situation, responsibility, or encumbrance. Query: is there a better verbal description of the impact that the dramatic sea-change in Corporate America's retirement...

Research in sociology and ethics suggests that individuals adhere to social norms of behavior established by their peers. Within an agency framework, we model endogenous social norms by assuming each agent's cost of implementing an action depends on the social norm for that action, defined to be...

It is a commonplace of American law that corporations are fictional. This is silly - corporations are all too-real (after all, most of us work for one, most of the physical goods on which we depend are made by them, the quality (and lack of quality) of our physical environment is dependent on...

Ethical awareness is growing and the word itself seems to be spreading to all walks of life. In medicine and economics a myriad of ethical committees have sprouted in an attempt to control the potential excesses of science or business transactions. How can one explain this craze for a word that...