The role of employers in setting up and overseeing pension schemes offered to their employees and the quality of investment schemes offered to individual investors have attracted considerable attention in the finance literature. This paper adds to the debate by showing that institutional...

Independent directors are appointed to represent the interests of mutual fund shareholders. Yet, being in the employment of fund–families, the fulfilment of fiduciary duties of independent directors may be compromised. Using a large, hand-collected dataset of over 10,000 U.S. mutual funds, we...

This paper studies the relationship between fund and provider characteristics, and fund performance using a sample of 4,197 U.K personal pension funds operated by 35 providers over a 30 years' period (1980-2009). The fund performance is measured on an annual basis (short-term) and over the whole...

Consumer confidence indices (CCIs) are a closely monitored barometer of countries' economic health, and an informative forecasting tool. Using European and US data, we provide a case study of the two recent stock market meltdowns (the post-dotcom bubble correction of 2000-2002 and the 2007-2009...

This paper sets the background to the Special Issue of the Journal of Empirical Finance on Challenges of Corporate Governance. It identifies the alternative approaches that can be taken to solve agency problems stemming from asymmetries of information: (i) ex-post monitoring through audit and...

In 2010, the Committee of European Securities Regulation (CESR) published the guidance on how to calculate the synthetic risk and reward indicator (SRRI) for Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) to improve disclosure and presentation of risk information in...

The creation of Bao products, i.e., Apps that facilitate instant transactions and access to money for money market mutual fund (MMF) investors, and the creation of full-payment Bao products, i.e., Apps that enable bill payments directly from MMF accounts, are a rare example of architectural...

This paper brings together the academic literature on individual and institutional investors in order to understand the nature of difficulties faced by them and set the background for the Special Issue. This introductory article and the papers in the Special Issue contribute to the debate on how...

It is recognized in the literature that there is a negative relationship between fund performance and fund exit. This paper analyses the performance of 6,600 U.S. mutual funds that exited the market in the 2000 – 2014 period and nearly twice as many U.S. mutual funds that remained operational,...

The desire to structure the remuneration of top banking executives and other material risk takers (MRTs), particularly the elements that are risk sensitive and aligned with long–term incentives of their institutions, is at the centre of the regulatory debate. This discussion is part of the...