There has been very little study of the consequences of pension wealth for the composition of household portfolios. Using individual data for 10,118 Canadian households we estimate the portfolio effect of pension wealth. Because most households do not own all of the assets which we are able to...

Taxation-both corporate and personal-has been held responsible for the low investment and productivity growth rates experienced in the West during the last decade. This book, a comparative study of the taxation of income from capital in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and West...

The 17th BIS Annual Conference took place in Zurich, Switzerland, on 22 June 2018. The event brought together a distinguished group of central bank Governors, leading academics and former public officials to exchange views on the topic "Ten years after the Great Financial Crisis: what has...

I argue that it is useful to think about the optimal design of monetary institutions using the insights from the theory of incomplete contracts. The core of the monetary policy problem is the uncertainty about future social decisions resulting from the impossibility and the undesirability of...

In 2009, demand in the world's major economies fell, relative to its pre-crisis trend, by around US$2.5 trillion or 5% of GDP. The financial crisis damaged virtually every country. Global imbalances helped to fuel the financial crisis. And today they threaten the sustainability of the recovery...

Over the past couple of decades, and especially since the financial crisis in 2008-09, real interest rates have collapsed. For much of the past two years they have been negative, but they have been trending down for some while. But how far have real rates fallen? This note computes a measure of...

The current debate on tax reform has raised again the question of how thecorporate tax system should be altered. The cumulative effect of piecemeal changes to the tax system has been to produce major distortions in thepattern of savings and investment and falling revenue in real terms....