The Foundations of Pension Finance presents in two authoritative volumes a selection of the most important published articles on systems of retirement income provision – an area that is of vital importance for the future of the economy in general and the financial system in particular.

Using data from the US, UK, Japan and Canada, this paper provides evidence on the benefits to an economy from "multiple avenues of intermediation". The overall conclusion is that the existence of active securities markets alongside banks is indeed beneficial to the stability of corporate...

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the UK and German economies. It is found that they do have...

This paper uses flow-of-funds and balance sheet data to analyze the impact of financial crises on corporate financing and GDP in a range of countries. Post-crisis GDP contractions are mainly accounted for by declines in investment and inventory and are more severe for emerging market countries....

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the U.K. and German economies. It is found that they do provide...

The U.K. pension system is traditionally seen as offering a good example to other countries, having features such as low social security pension expenditure and a high coverage of well-financed voluntary private schemes. But recent developments suggest that the model has shown weaknesses. The...

The share market boom in the 1990s is often linked to the acceleration in labour and total factor productivities over the same period. This paper explores the argument that labour and total factor productivities are inaccurate measures of firm's earnings, which underlie equity valuations, and...