Financial Economics

This book posits that retirement security is the central policy concern of our time. A generation of ‘Baby Boomers’ is on the verge of retirement, yet pension systems confront crushing challenges, and governments often appear confused about which direction they should move in. The book addresses the question: ‘What are the new risks and rewards in pensions, and what paths can stakeholders chose to solve these problems?’ In doing so, it explores three aspects of the evolution of risk and reward-sharing in retirement in order to offer guidance to pension fiduciaries, plan participants, and policymakers. First, it focuses on new perspectives for assessing retirement risks and rewards. Second, it evaluates efforts to insure retirement plans. Lastly, it provides several new strategies for managing retirement system risk.

The book describes the developments that caused mutual funds to go from a virtually unknown financial product in the 1920s to the largest financial industry in the world today. It covers the formation of the first mutual funds in the roaring ’20s; how the 1929 stock market crash, a disaster for most financial institutions, spurred the growth of mutual funds; the establishment in 1934, over FDR's objection, of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that regulates mutual funds; enactment of the Revenue Act of 1936, the tax law that saved mutual funds from extinction; passage of the Investment Company Act of 1940, the constitution of the mutual fund industry; creation of money market funds, which totally transformed the U.S. financial system; the accidental development of 401(k) plans, which revolutionized the way Americans save for retirement; and the late trading and market timing abuses, the greatest scandal ever in the history of the fund industry. The author was personally involved in developments over the past forty years, and much of the book is a personal narrative regarding the people and events that have shaped the mutual fund industry.

In 1940 few Americans had heard of mutual funds. Today, US mutual funds are the largest financial industry in the world, with over 88 million shareholders and over $11 trillion in assets. This book describes the developments that have produced mutual funds' long history of success. Among these are: the formation of the first mutual funds in the 1920s; how the 1929 stock market crash, a disaster for most financial institutions, spurred the growth of mutual funds; the establishment in 1934, over FDR's objection, of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that regulates mutual funds; and the enactment of the Revenue Act of 1936, the tax law that saved mutual funds from extinction. In addition the book details the passage of the Investment Company Act of 1940, the “constitution” of the mutual fund industry; the creation in 1972 of money market funds, which totally changed the mutual fund industry and the entire US financial system; the enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which created Individual Retirement Accounts; the accidental development of 401(k) plans, which have revolutionized the way Americans save for retirement; and the 2003 trading abuses, the greatest scandal ever in the history of the mutual fund industry. Many events have never been discussed in detail; others have been discussed in works on other subjects.

The ruling class plays a major role in our societies. It makes possible what would otherwise be infeasible, by shifting out those constraints that stand in the way of long-term growth. Historically, economists devoted far less attention than sociologists to the study of ruling classes. Using the theoretical tools of economists, this book provides an understanding of what drives the formation of a ruling class, and the relationship between politics and business firms. Focusing on Italy, it uses labour economics to analyse the selection of the ruling class, the labour market of politicians, the allocation of managers' time, and their incentives, remunerations, and career paths. It draws on contributions from two teams of leading scholars and on research undertaken by the Fondazione Rodolfo DeBenedetti. Part I focuses on the labour market of politicians. It uses detailed information on personal characteristics, incomes, performance in office, and career paths (before, as well as after, the Parliamentary mandate) of all the politicians elected to the Italian Lower Chamber (Camera) between 1948 and 2008. Part II is devoted to the managerial class. It includes cross-country surveys of managers across a sample of European countries, surveys carried out in cooperation with the largest union of managers in the service sector, social security records, and, for the first time, surveys on the allocation of time of top executives.

Social security systems are being reviewed and changed in many countries around the world. This book considers some of the key policy issues for design of a social security reform, as well as reviewing much of the academic literature on the positive and normative aspects of social security. The first chapter provides an examination of key policy issues of general concern includes the funding of social security, the comparison of defined benefit and defined contribution systems, notional defined contribution accounts, alternative approaches to organizing individual defined contribution accounts, and the provision of survivor benefits. The book then turns to the academic literature on the interactions between social security and the labor and capital markets, providing a non-technical overview of the existing literature and pointing-out gaps in current research findings. The second chapter reviews the impact on retirement decisions of forced savings, the use of an earnings or retirement test, mandated annuitization, recognizing heterogeneity in both life expectancy and possibly in risk classification for annuity pricing, and treatment of the family, particularly the use of joint-life annuitization. Also reviewed is the impact on labor supply at younger ages, considering mandatory savings and annuitization, contrasting defined benefit and defined contribution systems, and analysing alternative approaches to redistribution within social security. The final chapter covers issues of aggregate capital accumulation and risk-sharing, with the latter including the risks in annuitization, in the returns to capital, and in aggregate earnings. Also considered are the risks in the political process.

Sovereign wealth funds are a dynamic and sizeable force in international finance. There is surprisingly little information about their history, economics, investments, and politics. This book seeks to provide a better understanding of sovereign wealth funds beginning with their history and their evolution from small stabilization funds into major institutional investors. Then the book turns to the economics and finance of sovereign wealth funds seeking to understand the unique challenges facing states that establish sovereign wealth funds and how well they accomplish their task of stabilizing small oil dependent states and managing surplus capital reserves. Despite the focus on the potential for sovereign wealth funds to leverage their financial capital into foreign policy influence, the political ramifications of concentrated public wealth is demonstrated through distorted local economies and stunted domestic politics. Using a variety of case studies from major and unique sovereign wealth fund states coupled with an analysis of their historical, economic, and financial framework, this books lays out a framework of the challenges facing sovereign wealth funds and their founding states.

This book focuses on the interaction between equilibrium real exchange rates, optimal external debt, endogenous optimal growth, and current account balances in a world of uncertainty. The theoretical parts result from interdisciplinary research between economics and state of the art applied mathematics. From the economic theory and the mathematics of stochastic optimal control, benchmarks are derived for the optimal debt and equilibrium real exchange rate in an environment where both the return on capital and the real rate of interest are stochastic variables. The theoretically derived equilibrium real exchange rate — the natural real exchange rate (NATREX) — is where the real exchange rate is heading. These benchmarks are applied to answer the following questions: What is a theoretically based empirical measure of a “misaligned” exchange rate that increases the probability of a significant depreciation or a currency crisis? What is a theoretically based empirical measure of an “excess” debt that increases the probability of a debt crisis? What is the interaction between an excess debt and a misaligned exchange rate? The theory is applied to evaluate the Euro exchange rate, the exchange rates of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the sustainability of U.S. current account deficits, and derives warning signals of the Asian crises, defaults, and debt crises in emerging markets.

This is a book about Washington Consensus capitalism and the controversies its encroachment causes in Japan and Germany. Many people in both those countries share the assumptions dominant today in Britain and America that managers should be intent solely on creating shareholder value, and that shareholders' financial logic alone should determine who buys what company on the stock exchange. That way efficiency (and hence global welfare) will be maximized. Japanese and German advocates of full-bloodied market capitalism are not having it all their own way, however. In both countries there are articulate defenders of what they consider to be a better way of life, informed by a more human, more social-solidary, set of values. This book traces the debates which ensue on corporate governance, on worker rights, on supplier relations, on cartels and anti-trust, on pensions and welfare. It also analyses actual changes in economic behaviour — an essential means of sorting out a lot of the muddle and double-talk, not just in the internal debates themselves, but even more in the foreign reporting of them. These accounts of the battle for the national soul in Japan and Germany constitute a contribution to the ‘diversity of capitalism’ debate.

One of the most important decisions many people face is the choice of a portfolio of assets for retirement savings. The leading academic paradigm of portfolio choice, the mean‐variance analysis of Markowitz, does not give adequate guidance for this long‐term investment problem because it assumes that investors care only about the mean and variance of return over a single short period. The book develops an alternative paradigm, the inter‐temporal model of Merton, into an empirically usable framework with the following implications. The safe asset for a long‐term investor is not a Treasury bill, but a long‐term inflation‐indexed bond that provides a stable stream of real income. A nominal bond is a good substitute for an inflation‐indexed bond only if inflation risk is low. There is evidence that stock returns are mean‐reverting, with bull markets tending to follow bear markets and vice versa; this suggests that long‐term investors should increase their average stockholdings but should also vary their stockholdings with the overall level of the stock market. Investors with a stable stream of labour income can afford a greater exposure to stock market risk.

Aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students in economics, banking, and finance, this is a core textbook for the financial markets, institutions, and regulation option of courses in financial economics. It integrates modern theories of asymmetric information into the analysis of financial institutions, relating the theory to current developments. The text begins with an analysis of adverse selection in retail financial products such as life assurance, before looking at open capital markets where trades and prices provide information. It then progresses to the more complex areas of corporate governance and financial intermediation in which information is concealed, or confidential and moral hazard and verification problems become important. These chapters study the various mechanisms that the financial markets have developed to allow investors to delegate the management of their assets to others. This analysis is used to show how regulation can reduce the risk of financial failure and how legal, accounting, and regulatory mechanisms can help shape a country’s corporate and financial architecture. These difficult theoretical concepts are conveyed through the careful use of numerical illustrations and topical case studies. Each chapter ends with a set of exercises to test and reinforce students’ comprehension of the material. Worked solutions are provided for the numerical exercises.