Why, since the mid-1980s, have so many European governments decided fiscally to support the development of private retirement savings accounts? Whereas analysts of pension reform in affluent democracies have traditionally considered the development of private pensions as a secondary outcome of...

This Article explains how to create “survivor funds” — short-term investment funds that would pay more to those investors who live until the end of the fund's term than to those who die before then. For example, instead of just investing in a 10-year bond and dividing the proceeds among...

We assess the impact of geopolitical risk and world uncertainty on the sovereign debt risk of 26 European Economies during the period 1984-2022, through the implementation of OLS-Fixed Effects regressions and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). We find that geopolitical tensions and global...

The purpose of this paper, structured in three Sections, is twofold: (a) The first is to analyse the conditions under which a group of financial firms is considered to be a ‘financial conglomerate' in accordance with the (complex) definition of this term in Article 2 (point (14)) of the...

This paper argues that the Eurozone crisis stems from a risk management failure in the Eurosystem's design, and that applying insurance theory is useful. We model risk neutral agents choosing portfolios of government bonds of n countries in a monetary union and other assets. We firstly analyse a...

This paper argues that the Eurozone crisis stems from a risk management failure in the Eurosystem's design, and that applying insurance theory is useful. We model risk neutral agents choosing portfolios of government bonds of n countries in a monetary union and other assets. We firstly analyse a...

In some ways, a 2012 symposium on “Dilemmas of State Debt” may seem a bit behind the news curve. At the end of 2010, municipal bond markets were in a deep funk. Analysts predicted that countless municipalities and perhaps one or more of the United States might default on their debt...

In all Member States social security systems are used to help secure social goals such as protection against poverty. In the majority of European Union (EU) countries public schemes also play a core role in securing levels of pension benefits and health services that to a reasonable degree allow...

In all Member States social security systems are used to help secure social goals such as protection against poverty. In the majority of European Union (EU) countries public schemes also play a core role in securing levels of pension benefits and health services that to a reasonable degree allow...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of government debt and the associated risk of inflation within a monetary union when countries have different pension systems. I use a stochastic two-country two-period overlapping-generations model, where one country has PAYG pensions and the...