The paper traces the intertwined evolution of financial risk management and the financial derivatives markets. Spanning from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, this paper reveals the social, political and organizational factors that underpinned the exponential success of one of today's leading...

This analysis of the origins and development of a key financial derivatives market, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, suggests that social interaction in such markets generates trust, permits solution of collective action problems, and affects pricing. The growing cognitive complexity of...

Is the growth of modern financial risk management a result of the accuracy and reliability of risk models? This paper argues that the remarkable success of today's financial risk management methods should be attributed primarily to their communicative and organizational usefulness and less to...

Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a "chain": an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now...