Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...

We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households’ investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have...

Anonymous trading is the norm in today's financial markets but there are a few exceptions. We study one such case, the OMX Nordic Exchanges (Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Reykjavik) that have traditionally been more transparent than most other markets. On June 2, 2008 OMX Nordic switched...