Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...

Stress testing is a useful and increasingly popular, yet sometimes misunderstood, method of analyzing the resilience of financial systems to adverse events. This paper aims to help demystify stress tests and illustrate their strengths and weaknesses. Using an Excel-based template with...

This paper discusses the key sources of vulnerabilities for pension plans and insurance companies in light of the global financial crisis of 2008. It also discusses how these institutional investors transit shocks to the rest of the financial sector and economy. The crisis has re-ignited the...

The Chinese pension system is highly fragmented and decentralized, with governance standards, pension fund management practices, their regulation and supervision varying considerably both across the funded components of the Chinese pension system and across provinces. This paper describes the...

This paper analyzes the performance of the Bulgarian private defined contribution pensions in the second and third pillars of the pension system.

This book has three main objectives: (a) to discuss the main implications that consumers' inability to make rational choices can have on the functioning of second pillars, (b) to describe how jurisdictions have tried to address these problems through ad hoc policy interventions, and (c) to...

The paper surveys the corporate governance mechanisms that the economic literature identifies as useful in limiting the conflict-of-interest problem stemming from the separation of ownership and control, and from the dispersed nature of ownership. It summarizes the results of a survey of the...

Voluntary annuity markets are in most countries smaller than the theoretical and part of the empirical literature would suggest. There are both demand and supply constraints that hamper the development of annuity markets. In particular, traditional products available in most countries can...

Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...