We study how Small Business Administration (SBA) employees respond to salient defaults. Using novel data to identify employees transferring across SBA offices, we find that defaults on SBA loans in their previous workplace reduce SBA loans in their current workplace. The effect is independent of...

All humans and the institutions they create err from time to time. Regulatory agencies are no exception. This essay hypothesizes that by failing to recognize mutual fund abnormal returns as an open-access common pool subject to a race to first possession, the U.S. Securities and Exchange...

From European integration to domestic politics to the development of the global economy, technocracy and private ordering have shaped economic behaviour. Such transformative private-driven forces of economic activity flourished through the promulgation of voluntary standards. In view of the...

This paper contributes to addressing a fundamental question: how do institutions, in general, and financial regulators, in particular, “think”? To this end, the analytical tools of social psychology are applied to the regulatory framework for financial services in the European Union. The...

Group Self-annuitisation Schemes (GSAs), or Pooled Annuity Schemes, are designed to share uncertain future mortality experience including systematic improvements. They have been proposed because of the significant uncertainty of future mortality improvement on pension and annuity costs. The...

Group Self-annuitisation Schemes (GSAs), or Pooled Annuity Schemes, are designed to share uncertain future mortality experience including systematic improvements. They have been proposed because of the significant uncertainty of future mortality improvement on pension and annuity costs. The...

Defined benefit pensions are still an important part of retirement income security for 44 million people. After 2000, these plans experienced extreme difficulties. Although the magnitude of the problem was unprecedented, its causes were not. Interest rate and asset prices decline in a recession,...

Los bajos niveles de cotizacion a los sistemas de pensiones en America Latina son un enorme obstaculo que limita la puesta en practica de un sistema de seguridad social generalizado. Las tasas de cotizacion medidas como el indice de cotizantes respecto a la poblacion activa total se mantiene en...

Low contribution levels to pension schemes in Latin America are an enormous obstacle limiting the implementation of a broad-based social security system. Contribution rates measured as a ratio of contributors to the total labour force stand at an average of 40%, or 60% in the best of cases....