Since their inception, insurance companies, banks, and other financial institutions have played prominent roles in our capital markets. These intermediaries have fostered saving and investment by issuing liabilities that appeal to savers in order to purchase the obligations of investors on...

Central banks in larger industrialized countries increasingly favor market operations, the buying and selling of securities, over standing facilities, such as lending and deposit facilities, in conducting their monetary policies. In their market operations, foreign central banks most commonly...

After the sharp run-up in stock prices during the bull market of the late 1990s and their subsequent collapse in 2001–2002, the prices of equities as measured by the S&P 500 are once again uncommonly high relative to companies’ current and prospective earnings, causing some to question...

By most standards, the price of equities in the United States has risen remarkably rapidly during the last 15 years. Since 1994 alone, the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stock prices has doubled. Although the rapid growth of corporations' profits has propelled the price of their stock,...

More than two-thirds of the $25 trillion of financial assets held in the United States is managed on behalf of investors by financial intermediaries, ranging from trusts, mutual funds, and mortgage pools to insurance companies, pension funds, and banks. Because of their importance, governments...

The U.S. Department of Commerce regularly surveys businesses on their plans for capital investment. This article assesses the contribution that these surveys make to forecasts of business investment, once other economic variables are taken into account. The author finds that the surveys have...

This article compares the investment spending for each of 396 corporations during the late 1980s and early 1990s to projections of their spending derived from several basic models of investment. According to these models, capital spending, on average, adheres closely to output, profits, and the...

uring the 1980s, the proportion of business assets financed by debt exceeded that of any other period since World War II. The characteristics of financial securities also changed, as junk bonds, variants of preferred stock, warrants, and other forms of mezzanine financing became more common in...

Insurance companies, like other financial institutions, have been evolving from specialized businesses to enterprises offering a variety of financial services. Rising interest rates impelled this evolution during much of the past three decades as most insurers tried to remain competitive....