The Australian pension system is evolving, driven by changing regulation, financial innovation and changing political climates. This article offers a snapshot of its current trustee policies and practices and shows that industry funds and retail funds have different historical origins, leading...

Economic theories for policy are naturally biased either to capitalism or socialism, in ideological opposition. The theories are used as rhetorical tools by right or left politicians to argue for less or more government spending. The reality is: most economies are at least to some extent...

In the first paper, the lacklustre investment performance of Australian superannuation was attributed to the Retail sector. This second paper investigates potential explanations for this fact through an empirical attribution analysis of the impact of asset allocation, operational structure and...

This paper provides an overview of the financial performance trends of the Australian superannuation system in the period 1997-2016, based on audited accounting data. Strong contribution flows have allowed total assets to grow at an average annual rate of about ten percent to $2 trillion by June...

Classical, neoclassical and Austrian economists assume that self-interest in exchanges is alone sufficient to make markets work, because of the invisible hand of Adam Smith. This assumption has motivated market deregulation. On the contrary, we argue that Adam Smith was not assuming or...

The public's positive impression of Australian superannuation comes from the rapid asset growth of the system and selective sampling inherent in focusing on performance of funds and options may over-estimate the performance of the whole system by two percent per annum due to survivorship bias....

It is shown empirically that for decades, the US economy has been in a state of stagflation which is defined by rising prices and simultaneously falling economic growth. It is a phenomenon involving not just “secular stagnation” (Summers, 2015) of low growth, but high inflation as well. A...

The revelations from the Hayne Royal Commission (HRC, 2019), limited though they were by the terms of reference, have come as a shock to most people, including Australian politicians, officials, academics and the media. Their expressed shock indicates a high degree of ignorance about the...

The Value-at-Risk (VaR) risk measure has been widely used in finance and insurance for capital and risk management. However, in recent years it has fallen somewhat out of favour due to a seminal paper by Artzner et al. (1999) who showed that VaR does not in general have all the four coherence...

The Keynesian intuition that increasing consumption can stimulate investment is verified empirically using US macroeconomic data. The investment multiplier is hypothesized to increase monotonically with the propensity to consume. However, the functional relationship is not that of the Keynesian...