Analysts have raised serious questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save enough for retirement. This is of obvious policy interest given the need to reform national retirement income programs. In the present paper we examine recent research developments regarding retirement...

Public sector pension plans are managed in diverse ways, with governance policies distinguished according to their board composition and size, how the trustees structure their investment decisions, what restrictions are placed on their investments, and whether they have independent performance...

In 1975, Congress directed the SEC to develop a national market system in which all orders to buy or sell equities would interact. A national market system abhors fragmentation and assumes that one market will best serve the needs of all investors. Such an assumption does not capture the...

Many argue that one category of bank clientele may have been lost in the rapidly changing structure of the U.S. banking industry small business borrowers. One reason for the concern over small business credit availability is the argument that small business has fallen victim to the increasing...

In recent years banks have had to operate in an increasingly competitive environment. How banks will be affected by the increased competitive pressures depends in part on how efficiently they are run.<p> <p> This paper uses the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach to study efficiency at banks...</p></p>

Banks have been engaging in foreign direct investment (FDI) for over 150 years. In doing so, they have had to deal with the problems of the liability of foreignness, generally without being able to depend on proprietary administrative or physical technology. Foreign direct investment in banking...

Although the choice of an IPO offer price level would seem to have little economic significance, firms do not decide this arbitrarily. Our findings suggest that firms select their IPO offer prices to target a desired ownership structure, which in turn has implications for underpricing and...

We address the problem of portfolio management in the international bond markets. Interest rate risk in the local market, exchange rate volatility across markets, and decisions for hedging currency risk are integral parts of this problem. The paper develops a stochastic programming optimization...

In this paper we consider the relative merits of net versus gross settlement of interbank payments. Net settlement economizes on the costs of holding non-interest-bearing reserves, but increases moral hazard problems. The "put option" value of default under net settlement can also distort banks'...

In this paper we have presented a new approach to measure the return-risk trade-off in portfolios of risky debt instruments, whether bonds or loans. The use of complex, statistically based portfolio techniques to manage assets of financial institutions and fixed income portfolio money managers...