With a move away from up-front charges following the introduction of stakeholder pensions, consumers are no longer penalised for lapsing on many long-term savings policies. Nevertheless, persistency rates may still provide an (imperfect) indicator of sales quality and provide some information on...

This paper examines the performance of personal pensions (exempt unit trusts) in the UK 1980-2000. Unitised personal pension schemes are a type of mutual fund that is constituted as a contractual savings scheme, whose value can only be accessed at retirement. By studying the performance of these...

Our purpose in this paper is to produce a tractable model which illuminates problems relating to individual bank behaviour and risk-taking, to possible contagious interrelationships between banks, and to the appropriate design of prudential requirements and incentives to limit ‘excessive’...

(This article was first published in the Financial Times Mastering Risk series, 2000 under the title of 'Power and Influence in Risk Regulation'). Introduction The regulation of business and corporate risk management are inextricably related. Regulation is one way in which risks are managed in...

This paper examines how well forecasters can predict the future time path of (policy-determined) short-term interest rates. Most prior work has been done using U.S. data; in this exercise we use forecasts made for New Zealand by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) and those derived from money...

This article explores the principles that should guide efforts to raise finance for climate action in developing countries. The main conclusions are that, first, there is an important role for private finance, which would be facilitated by having pervasive and broadly uniform emissions pricing...

We identify the inefficiencies that arise when negotiation between two parties takes place in the presence of transaction costs. First, for some values of these costs it is efficient to reach an agreement but the unique equilibrium outcome is one in which agreement is never reached. Secondly,...

This is a book about traders in financial markets: what they do, the kind of people they are, how they perceive the world they inhabit, how they make decisions and take risks. This is also a book about how traders are managed - the best and the worst examples - and about the institutions they...

This study updates and extends to the period 88/89-92-93 our earlier analysis of the public finances of India. With the collapse of the communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, India found itself, by early 1991, in the unenviable position of having possibly the most...

The paper examines Hungary''s experience with banking and bankruptcy reform in the period 1992-94. The first part of the paper uses enterprise-level data to show that in 1992, the same year in which the amount of classified loans in the state-owned commercial banks grew enormously, the...