Background, International prespective, UK developments, Striking a balance, Looking ahead - Solvency II...

For insurers conducting traditional activities: prudential measures need to recognize the medium and long term nature of the liabilities; appropriate buffers should be used effectively to minimize pro-cyclical effects...

Recent advances in brain research have provided new evidence thatearly experience matters and have greatly increased interest in theeffects of early childhood interventions on outcomes for children. Thispaper reviews what is now known about the potential benefits andpotential ill effects of...

Paternalism, the interference with a person, against their will, for her own good, has longbeen held in disregard. Yet recently, new arguments for paternalistic governmentinterventions have been proposed. These arguments draw on two premises. First, theproposed paternalism is characterised as...

One region where e-commerce will have a particular impact for small and medium-sizedenterprises (SMEs) over the next few years will be in South East Wales (SEW). In response tothis a survey was undertaken by the Welsh Enterprise Institute (WEI) in collaboration with theOpen University Business...

Almost one third of the population in developing countries is under age 15. Hence improvingthe effectiveness of policy interventions that target adolescents might be especiallyimportant. We analyze the intention to participate in training programs of adolescent girlsin Uganda, a country with...

Can pegging reduce real as well as nominal, and multilateral as well as bilateralexchange rate volatility? We investigate this issue using monthly data for 139countries from January 1990 to June 2006...

[...]This paper examines the impact that the PCAstandards had on bank portfolios following the passage ofFDICIA in 1991. To do this, the simultaneous equationsmodel developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992), and latermodified by Jacques and Nigro (1997) to study the impactof risk-based capital, is...

Much of the discourse about regional andlocal economic development strategiesin the United States over the pasttwenty-five years has looked like asearch for general rules. Very few such rules have emerged,in part because—like all policy debates—there have beenlarge inputs of ideology and...

We propose a novel approach to measuring the causal effect of family structureon a child’s outcomes. In a war, some fathers are killed in action and cannotreturn to their families. This creates a natural experiment in which the effectsof a father’s absence can be tested. Using data from the...