India''s planned pension reform will set up a proper regulatory framework for the pension industry and open up the sector to private fund managers. Drawing on international experiences, the paper highlights pre-conditions for the reform to kick-start financial development, including: (i) the...

Annuity premiums are often assumed to be constant, although they can be expected to vary with the yield curve. Variations in premiums will become an important public policy issue as defined-contribution (DC) pension plans play an increasingly prominent role in providing retirement income. As DC...

Insurance enterprises provide services, called insurance services, to policyholders. The values of such services are seldom, if ever, directly apparent; rather these values are implicitly entwined within the payment of premiums. This paper discusses the treatment of insurance services, and...

Increasing use of life insurance instruments and company-sponsored funds in France suggests that French households may be inclined to a greater reliance on financial savings as a source of retirement income. This paper examines the challenges imposed by an aging population on the pay-as-you-go...

Rather than taking on more risk, US insurers hit hard by the crisis pulled back from risk taking, relative to insurers not hit as hard by the crisis. Capital requirements alone do not explain this risk reduction: insurers hit hard reduced risk within assets with identical regulatory treatment....

This paper focuses on asset allocation decisions of life insurance companies in emerging markets. Mature market insurers allocate only a small fraction of their assets to emerging markets because of regulatory constraints, rating pressures, and currency risk. However, global insurers invest...

Effective public investment requires governments to address the "recurrent cost problem" to ensure operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures are sufficient to sustain the flow of productive public capital services to private factors of production. Building on the model of Buffie et al...

We create a network of bilateral correlations of changes in sovereign bond yields and individual bank equity price changes since 2000. We extract some stylized facts from this network of asset price correlations and document the clear differences in asset price correlations between safe havens...