The aim of this paper is to put forward a relevant indicator that could help supervisors to regulate the excessive use of leverage which gives rise to systemic risk. We suggest the aggregated leverage ratio named “Global Aggregated Leverage Ratio” (GALR), which encompasses the activity of...

The current crisis has underlined the failure of the credit economy based on the investment banking model which has promoted the extension of market participants and, an increased use of leverage. The agents responsible for the excessive leverage are out of the scope of supervisors. The aim of...

This paper attempts to analyse the main characteristics of the Northern Rock crisis and the responses of the Bank of England as lender of last resort. On the basis of the diagnosis about the causes and the handling of this banking crisis we detect the shortcomings prevailing in the UK prudential...

This paper deals with two issues. On the one hand, it shows that structural changes in financial markets and in the hedge funds industry make the “light-touch” arguments for regulating hedge funds no longer relevant. On the other hand, pleas for stronger regulation of hedge funds are getting...

While private equity funds have become responsible for an enormous amount of investment in the economy due to the increasing interest of pension funds, the literature that analyses private equity allocation is very scarce. These types of investments are not only attractive for pension funds...

In this paper, we investigate the relative importance of drivers to pension funds’ asset allocation choices. We specifically test if the contrast between regulatory approaches of public and private Defined Benefits (DB) pension funds in the US, Canada and the Netherlands have an impact on the...

This paper investigates to what extent IFRS standards may cause incentives or constraints on long-term investment strategies of French insurance companies, based on 43 semi-structured interviews of insurance companies’ managers, regulators and professional organizations in France. Our results...

This paper investigates the characteristics of US and Canadian pension funds that allocate assets to hedge funds. The typical pension fund that invests in hedge funds is a large sophisticated pension fund that diversi…es its portfolio across numerous classes of investments, private equity in...

Pension fund return s can be decomposed into different sources, including market movements, asset allo-cation policy, and active portfolio management. We use a unique database covering the asset allocations of US defined-benefit pension funds for the perio d 1990–2008, and we test the role...