This book is a non-technical introduction to the history of - and current measurement practice of - inflation for the United Kingdom, with comparative international case studies. The authors describe the historical development of inflation measures in a global context, and do so without using...

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: The Early History of Inflation Measurement -- Chapter 3: The Launch of the Index of Retail Prices -- Chapter 4: Improving the Index -- Chapter 5: The RPI in the Political Sphere -- Chapter 6: Reviews of the RPI and the Loss of National Statistics Status --...

This paper is the first to investigate the importance of geography in explaining equity market participation. We provide evidence to support two distinct local area effects. The first is a community ownership effect, that is, individuals are influenced by the investment behavior of members of...

The U.S. retirement system is often described as a three-legged stool in which the legs represent Social Security, employer pensions, and individual savings. This metaphor can be somewhat misleading, however, because it inaccurately suggests that the three sources of retirement income are...

A number of recent studies find that poor health is empirically associated with a safer portfolio allocation. It is difficult to say, however, whether this relationship is truly causal. Both health status and portfolio choice are influenced by unobserved characteristics such as risk attitudes,...

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employee's perspective. Indeed,...

We examine 401(k) borrowing since 1992 and identify a puzzle: despite potential gains from borrowing against 401(k) assets instead of from other sources, most eligible households eschew 401(k) loans, including many who carry relatively expensive balances on credit cards and auto loans. We...

We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of comprehensive wealth - defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams - to the wealth that would...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....