Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significant demographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

Common systemic risk measures focus on the instantaneous occurrence of triggering and systemic events. However, systemic events may also occur with a time-lag to the triggering event. To study this contagion period and the resulting persistence of institutions' systemic risk we develop and...

The changing social, financial and regulatory frameworks, such as an increasingly aging society, the current low interest rate environment, as well as the implementation of Solvency II, lead to the search for new product forms for private pension provision. In order to address the various...

On 11 March 2015, SUERF jointly organised a conference with the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Austrian Society for Bank Research (Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft - BWG). The present SUERF Study 2015/2 includes a selection of papers based on the authors' contributions to the Vienna...

The European Commission has published a Green Paper outlining possible measures to create a single market for capital in Europe. Our comments on the Commission's capital markets union project use the functional finance approach as a starting point. Policy decisions, according to the functional...

The Liikanen Group proposes contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds as instruments to enhance financial stability in the banking industry. Especially life insurance companies could serve as CoCo bond holders as they are already the largest purchasers of bank bonds in Europe. The growing number of...