The availability of uncommitted funds is used as a measure of the financial quality of pension funds. Panel logit models with data from the Swiss Pension Fund Statistics are estimated to identify structural characteristics of funds, most of them under control of their foundation board, that...

We revisit the firm value and pricing implications of the negative screening of sin stocks. Unlike prior work, we find that institutional ownership and valuations related to sin stocks are not different from those of other stocks after controlling for differences in fundamentals between sin and...

This paper investigates orderly resolutions of debts in a system of firms holding debts both within and outside the system. A firm defaulting on its external debts, say a bank defaulting on customers' deposits, becomes bankrupt. An orderly resolution avoids coordination failures and uncontrolled...

The survey analyses the financial advisor-investor relationship in order to identify areas for improvement due to gaps in communication, limited knowledge and poor exchange of information.The 2020 Report investigates whether the financial advisor-investor relationship may lead to a higher...

We propose generalized versions of strong equity and Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. We study the existence and the real valued representation of social welfare relations satisfying these two generalized equity principles. Our results characterize the restrictions on one period utility domains...

This paper models the welfare consequences of social fragmentation arising from technological advance. We start from the premise that technological progress falls primarily on market-traded commodities rather than prosocial relationships, since the latter intrinsically require the expenditure of...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even if agents are heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point in time there may exist a «median voter» whose...

The purpose of central bank minutes is to give an account of monetary policy meeting discussions to outside observers, thereby enabling them to draw informed conclusions about future policy. However, minutes are by necessity a shortened and edited representation of a broader discussion....

How does opinion polarization over matters of moral conviction affect the legislative outcome of parliamentary institutions? Analysis reveals that in the relatively common case, in which a party's voting power is positively correlated with the public support of the convictions it represents, if...

We develop a formula for the optimal size of a joint savings association between individuals who share the same financial goal and who can save towards that goal at the same rate. Our motivating example and the core of our analysis is a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). We measure...