A survey of the literature on asset price impacts on the real economy shows a much wider range of work on consumption and related wealth effects than on investment. The existence of wealth effects on consumption is little contested, but there remains an issue of whether different effects should...

We seek to assess the relationship between commercial property price movements and the behavior and performance of individual banks in a range of industrialized economies, extending the existing micro literature on bank performance. Our results suggest that commercial property prices tend to be...

The UK financial market has been severely affected by the recent financial crisis. The crisis has exposed weaknesses in the supervisory framework as well as that for crisis management and resolution. This paper reviews the supervisory and regulatory framework and the many reforms that have...

Emphasising the scope for further growth in institutional investment, in Europe in particular, this paper focuses on the impact of institutional investment on the efficiency and stability of financial systems. The paper stresses the scope for efficiency gains arising from an increasing role of...

Annuities are a vital aspect of a growing number of reformed pension systems around the world, and will be of increasing relevance in Europe as reform of generous social security schemes gathers pace. This paper addresses the regulation of annuities, essential to ensure integrity of the system,...

The U.K. pension system is traditionally seen as offering a good example to other countries, having features such as low social security pension expenditure and a high coverage of well-financed voluntary private schemes. But recent developments suggest that the model has shown weaknesses. The...

Motivated by the frequently observed link between commercial property price volatility and banking crises, this paper investigates at a macroeconomic level the determination of commercial property prices and the interaction between commercial property prices and bank lending. We develop a...

We seek to assess the effect of commercial property price movements on the behaviour and performance of individual banks in a range of industrialised economies, extending the existing micro literature on bank performance. Our results suggest that commercial property prices tend to be positively...

This study presents empirical evidence on the influence of sponsoring companies on the funding and portfolio allocation of pension funds, an issue on which most extant literature is theoretical. We use a unique microdataset of 550 Dutch defined benefit company pension funds and 100 sponsoring...

We estimate the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on investment, using panel estimation featuring a decomposition of exchange rate volatility derived from the components GARCH model of Engle and Lee (1999). For a poolable subsample of EU countries, it is the transitory and not the permanent...