This volume is part of a series of monographs on private pensions in OECD countries. Previous titles have considered the situation in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. The United Kingdom pension system has some distinctive characteristics. Publicly-provided pensions have become...

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...

Financial conditions indices (FCIs) have been developed to summarise financial conditions and also supplement more traditional macroeconomic forecasting. They capture market expectations but also quantitative and survey information. This paper seeks to provide up to date financial conditions...

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the U.K. and German economies. It is found that they do provide...