Many people find it difficult to start and maintain a retirement savings plan. We show how nudges can be used both to encourage people to save enough to provide an acceptable standard of living in retirement and to draw down their accumulated pension fund to maximize retirement spending, without...

This article re-examines key explanations of the Global Financial Crisis-product complexity, behavioural biases in decision making, systemic risk, and regulatory arbitrage and capture-and finds a common underlying cause, namely gaming by personnel at all levels in the banking sector and its...

The recent crisis highlighted, once again, the importance of early warning models to assess the soundness of individual banks. In the present study, we use six quantitative techniques originating from various disciplines to classify banks in three groups. The first group includes very strong and...

We estimate a model of holding period adjustment for four stock indices in the UK over the period 1980 to 2004. We postulate zone-symmetric investor preferences that result in an estimable ESTAR (Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive) model of the holding period for common stocks as a...

Using a Markov switching unobserved component model we decompose the term premium of the North American CDX investment grade index (CDX-IG) into a permanent and a stationary component. We explain the evolution of the two components in relating them to monetary policy and stock market variables....

This paper addresses the impact of developments in the credit risk transfer market on the viability of a group of systemically important financial institutions. We propose a bank default risk model, in the vein of the classic Merton-type, which utilizes a multi-equation framework to model...

This paper addresses the impact of developments in the credit risk transfer market on the viability of a group of systemically important financial institutions. We propose a bank default risk model, in the vein of the classic Merton-type, which utilizes a multi-equation framework to model...