The Australian superannuation system was founded on the assumption that market competition will deliver economic efficiency in a largely private defined contribution system. Since the Wallis Report (1997) explicitly articulated this view, total assets in the system have grown substantially...

This paper proposes an approach to design a national default option to maximize retirement savings in defined contribution superannuation, using a proportionate shareholding approach which minimizes total cost of investing for all investors.The paper provides a new rationale for passive...

This paper proposes that the global financial and economic crisis has a single cause underlying all other causes. The single cause is attributed to the economic paradigm which drives individual behaviour, business, government and education. We define the economic paradigm and explain its power...

Economic theories for policy are naturally biased either to capitalism or socialism, in ideological opposition. The theories are used as rhetorical tools by right or left politicians to argue for less or more government spending. The reality is: most economies are at least to some extent...

Classical, neoclassical and Austrian economists assume that self-interest in exchanges is alone sufficient to make markets work, because of the invisible hand of Adam Smith. This assumption has motivated market deregulation. On the contrary, we argue that Adam Smith was not assuming or...

This technical note proves a simple mathematical relationship between the return on assets (ROA) of financial accounting standards and the return on investments (ROI) of investment performance standards. We show why this relationship is needed by users of APRA data to convert ROA to ROI for...

The Australian pension system is evolving, driven by changing regulation, financial innovation and changing political climates. This article offers a snapshot of its current trustee policies and practices and shows that industry funds and retail funds have different historical origins, leading...

The revelations from the Hayne Royal Commission (HRC, 2019), limited though they were by the terms of reference, have come as a shock to most people, including Australian politicians, officials, academics and the media. Their expressed shock indicates a high degree of ignorance about the...

The Value-at-Risk (VaR) risk measure has been widely used in finance and insurance for capital and risk management. However, in recent years it has fallen somewhat out of favour due to a seminal paper by Artzner et al. (1999) who showed that VaR does not in general have all the four coherence...

Compared with large institutional pension funds, there is relatively little published research on small funds, which are defined in the Australian superannuation legislation as pension funds with less than five members. Small funds account for more than 20% of total pension assets and they are...