Non-bank financial intermediaries both complement and compete with commercial banks, forcing them to be more efficient and responsive to customers' needs. Especially, pension funds and other institutional investors that mobilize large long-term financial resources can act as countervailing...

This paper discusses urban services finance in the Latin American context of rapid urbanization, severe fiscal constraints and democratization of administrative systems. Analyzing the situation in thirteen different countries, it draws several conclusions which may be helpful in the design of...

The Danish ATP (Arbejdmarkedets Tillaegs Pension or Labor Market Supplementary Pension) fund is a public pension fund that was created in 1964 to complement the universal pension benefit that is financed from general tax revenues and is paid to all old-age residents. When it was created,...

Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was a widespread practice for Danish pension institutions to guarantee a...

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...