This paper analyses Egypt's social protection systems. It asks why poverty is so widespread and why – despite the country's numerous sophisticated social protection systems - social risks are a major contributing factor to poverty in Egypt. It concludes that reforms are due. The existing...

This Article explains how to create “survivor funds” — short-term investment funds that would pay more to those investors who live until the end of the fund's term than to those who die before then. For example, instead of just investing in a 10-year bond and dividing the proceeds among...

Why, since the mid-1980s, have so many European governments decided fiscally to support the development of private retirement savings accounts? Whereas analysts of pension reform in affluent democracies have traditionally considered the development of private pensions as a secondary outcome of...

In diesem Beitrag werden mögliche ordnungspolitische Konsequenzen der Finanzmarktkrise in Folge der Turbulenzen auf dem US-amerikanischen Hypothekenkreditmarkt diskutiert. Zunächst erläutern die Autoren theoretisch und empirisch die Phänomene der Bankenkrisen und der Ansteckung in einem...

The global financial crisis has revealed the weaknesses of the European financial market, which triggered the European Union (EU) work on further integration of this market. The aim of this article is to present the direction of changes concerning the integration of the EU financial market....

The financial and the insurance markets are increasingly penetrating each other, accounting for the fact that insurers are more and more often seen as major institutional investors of capital markets. The capital market offers a range of new opportunities, although it is not devoid of faults,...

Public questioning about the role of finance has been fuelled by the perception that financial sector pay is an important factor behind high economic inequalities. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive look at the level of earnings in finance and the implications for labour income...

Flood insurance differs widely in scope and form across Europe. Against the backdrop of rising flood losses a debate about the role of EU policy in shaping the future of this compensation tool is led by policy makers and industry. In this paper we investigate if and how current EU policies...

This paper argues that the Eurozone crisis stems from a risk management failure in the Eurosystem's design, and that applying insurance theory is useful. We model risk neutral agents choosing portfolios of government bonds of n countries in a monetary union and other assets. We firstly analyse a...

We study the dependence between the downside risk of European banks and insurers. Since the downside risk of banks and insurers differs, an interesting question from a supervisory point of view is the risk reduction that derives from diversification within large banks and financial...