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...

Against the background of the acknowledged importance of off-balance-sheet exposures in the sub prime crisis, we seek to investigate whether this was a new phenomenon or common to earlier crises. Using a logit approach to predicting banking crises in 14 OECD countries we find a significant...

Early warning systems (EWS) for banking crises generally omit bank capital, bank liquidity and property prices. Most work on EWS has been for global samples dominated by emerging market crises where time series data on bank capital adequacy and property prices are typically absent. We estimate...

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...