Spurred on by the recent financial crises, a growing number of institutional investors are working to bypass traditional financial intermediaries, agents and centers through the development of in-house teams of investment professionals. As such, the institutional investment community, which is...

This paper deals with pension fund investment in urban infrastructure projects. It is suggested that the potential returns (and risks) with such projects are significantly greater than fixed income products though they have long gestation periods like gilt-edge securities. Our argument begins...

Concern about the competence of individual decision-makers has prompted governments and pension plan sponsors to take advantage of the insights gleaned from the behavioural revolution. Auto-enrolment, target-date and related investment strategies may effectively counter behavioural biases such...

Asset allocation is a classic topic in the theory of finance, and a crucial issue for investment policy. Noted for its significance in driving pension fund performance, it is also an issue that individual investors consider when designing their investment portfolios. In theory, Markowitz and...

For pension funds and other institutional investors, governance refers to the resources and processes used in decision-taking. Recognising that risk and uncertainty are the life-blood of investment strategy, in this paper we develop a resource-based framework to better understand the structure...

Squeezed between increasing entitlement expenditures and static or declining real revenues, state-funded urban development is increasingly an unaffordable luxury. At the same time, the power and significance of the banking sector is giving way to new kinds of financial institutions that have...

With the collapse of the TMT bubble and a number of high-profile scandals of corporate governance around the world, the language of finance is being re-written to include market inefficiency. Not surprisingly, there is an increasing premium on market information - national and international. As...

In a previous paper we emphasised the changing national and international accounting standards used to measure net pension liability. Beginning with the implications of this analysis for the financing of German employer-sponsored pensions, in this paper we focus upon the internal management of...

If its prospects were doubted in the early 1990s, London is now the preeminent international financial centre. It dominates its European rivals, and is joined with New York in a non-stop reciprocal global embrace. Whereas some analysts approach this topic concentrating on the nature and quality...

The retirement of the baby boom generation is a profound threat to the structure and organisation of continental European retirement systems. Whereas the German financial system, for example, has been often favourably compared to the Anglo-American system of corporate governance, it is argued in...