A traditionally conservative country in financial matters, India enacted a series of reforms in response to its balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s. But since then only halting progress has been made, raising concerns about India’s rising fiscal deficit, inefficiencies in its...

This paper analyses the systemic risk in an emerging market context, with two innovations. It uses the average of the percentile ranking of three widely used measures of systemic risk of a firm to calculate a single systemic risk index (SRI) for the firm. It then uses the SRI to identify...

We investigate whether households adjust retirement savings decisions in re-sponse to changes in the means-tested public pension plans. The policy in question lowered the taper rate of the assets test on the age pension in Australia in 2007. We use HILDA, a detailed micro panel data-set for...

Mutual fund companies typically charge investors distribution fees, such as 12b-1 fees in the United States, which they then use to pay commissions to brokers. We evaluate a major Indian investor protection reform that limited the ability of mutual funds to charge distribution fees to pay broker...

Many countries have policies offering transfers or other entitlements, subject to a resources test. In most cases, these exempt the family home. While the impacts of means-tested programs on saving and labor supply have been extensively studied, exempting the owner-occupier home has escaped...

This paper describes the New Pension System (NPS), an individual account defined contribution pension scheme introduced for civil servants in India, and the problems faced in implementation of this system. We describe what has been achieved in the implementation of the NPS, and the challenges...

Financial distribution, where the distributor is the agent of both the product provider and the customer has been found to inherently work against the interests of customers, in the form of high service fees and perverse incentives in sales practices. This paper proposes segregation of financial...