With few exceptions, mainly in Asia, mutual funds grew explosively in most countries around the world during the 1990s. Equity funds predominated in Anglo-American countries while bond funds predominated in most of Continental Europe, and in middle-income countries. Capital market development...

The authors provide a detailed study of the Swiss pension system, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. The unfunded public pillar is highly redistributive. It has near universal coverage, a low dispersion of benefits (the maximum public pension is twice the minimum), and no ceiling on...

One of the strongest objections to personal pension plans is that they transfer investment risk to individual workers, who are then exposed to the vagaries of equity and bond markets. Using historical United States data, the authors investigate the impact of the volatility of investment returns...

Institutional investors comprise pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds. Should a country promote their creation if it lacks well-developed securities markets? The answer to this question, says the author, varies by type of investor. He argues that private pension funds and...

Indonesia's nascent capital markets stand to benefit significantly from a thriving pension industry. Now is the time to reform the pensions system, while it has a vibrant economy, rapidly rising income, and a young and growing workforce. The author suggests three main reforms. First, to...

The authors address the trading strategies of mutual funds in emerging markets. The data set they develop permits analyses of these strategies at the level of individual portfolios. A methodologically novel feature of their analysis: they disentangle the behavior of fund managers from that of...

The author analyzes the typical model for regulating investments in private pension funds. Pension reforms like those pioneered by Chile are being initiated or considered in Argentina, Bolivia, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hungary, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and elsewhere. Such reforms greatly...

The author argues that public and private pillars are essential for a well-functioning pension system. Public pillars, funded or unfounded, offer basic benefits that are independent of the performance of financial markets. Since financial markets suffer from prolonged, persistent, and large...

Bolivia's bold program of pension reform involved the immediate closing down of the old pay-as-you-go system and its replacement by a defined-contribution system based on individual capitalization accounts and managed by the private sector. The pensions of the old system will be covered by the...

The author examines the implications of demutualization of financial exchanges for their roles as self-regulatory organizations. Many regulators and exchanges believe that conflicts of interest increase when exchanges convert to for-profit businesses. Demutualization also changes the nature of...