Over the past few months, major equity markets generally have continued their upward trend, while interest rates at the long end of the maturity spectrum have declined. Meanwhile, credit spreads for both investment grade and sub-investment grade borrowers continue to be compressed and volatility...

Ageing will translate into long run trends in supply as well as demand of capital in the next decades. This paper provides some quantitative assessments of the effects on financial markets of ageing in four large OECD countries (United States, Japan, Germany, and France). Using a simplified...

The statistical exercise covers an extensive range of indicators. At this stage of the data collection, most of the relevant information was collected on autonomous pension funds, the fund type for which most of the detailed information was provided. However, autonomous pension funds do not...

The article describes the results of a modeling exercise to gauge the size of potential pension fund demand for bonds under some simplifying assumptions, so as to illustrate the potential role of this specific group of investors. It provides a measure of the potential excess demand for...

Over the past few years China has emerged as a major player in the global economy with a pivotal position in global production, trade and, increasingly, finance. In the context of large imbalances in world growth rates, China has helped sustain world economic expansion, especially in the Asia...

This article follows up on monitoring and analysing developments and structural issues related to risk capital undertaken by the OECD since the mid-1990s. Risk capital, i.e. finance for fast-growth SMEs, should help to foster entrepreneurship and a high rate of company formation which is seen as...

In November 2006, the OECD Steering Group on Corporate Governance initiated a study of the role of privately organised pools of capital (“alternative investment vehicles”) in corporate governance. With a rapid increase in the size of transactions and investments, and partly due to...

After some significant corrections in the second half of May and in early June, major equity markets have resumed their growth, in some cases regaining levels reached before the May-June contraction. Against a backdrop of healthy corporate balance sheets, robust earnings growth and low default...

Many commentators have postulated a “financing gap” for small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs), meaning that there are significant numbers of SMEs that could use funds productively if they were available, but cannot obtain finance from the formal financial system. This article summarises...

A useful proxy for the total assets accumulated in long-term savings and retirement systems is the sum of investments of pension funds and life insurance companies. This proxy covers the vast majority of occupational and personal pension arrangements for both the public and private sectors that...