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 institution-specific data, readers are walked through the basics of liability valuation and stress testing of assets and liabilities of a typical defined benefit plan.
Mandatory defined contribution pension markets are present in a growing number of countries around the world. But despite their popularity, policymakers continue to struggle with two key policy concerns. On the one hand, a number of design shortcomings encourages pension firms to charge high administrative fees. On the other hand, the global crisis that started in 2007 has reignited the debate on whether pension participants bear excessive investment risk. Both are valid policy concerns as their incidence can imply higher than expected levels of poverty among old age individuals. Both concerns have the same root problem---the limited capacity of individuals to choose what is best for them. This, in turn, stems from a combination of inadequate financial education, bounded rationality and the use of simplistic 'rules of thumb' that produce systematic biases in the decision making process of individuals. While improving financial education is an obvious avenue to pursue, this book is more concerned with design features that can exploit these systematic biases to protect consumers from themselves. 'New Policies for Mandatory Defined Contribution Pensions: Industrial Organization Models and Investment Products' (i) discusses the main implications for the functioning of mandatory defined contribution pensions of consumers inability to make rational choices; (ii) describes how jurisdictions have tried to address these problems through ad hoc policy interventions; and (iii) proposes new policy directions in the areas of industrial organization models and investment products to address these concerns more effectively. Written for practitioners and researchers around the world, this book provides access to new thinking on mandatory defined contribution pension systems and it makes an important contribution to the on-going policy debate on how to best structure mandatory defined contribution pillars.
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 key components of the system, highlights the progress made to date and identifies remaining weaknesses, in regard to information disclosure, the governance framework and pension fund management standards.
Countries in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) experienced a credit boom-bust cycle in the last decade. This paper analyzes the roles of demand and supply factors in explaining this credit cycle. Our analysis first focuses on a large sample of bank-level data on credit growth for the entire CESEE region. We complement this analysis by five case studies (Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, and Romania). Our results of the panel data analysis indicate that supply factors, on average and relative to demand factors, gained in importance in explaining credit growth in the post-crisis period. In the case studies, we find a similar result for Lithuania and Montenegro, but the other three case studies point to the fact that country experiences were heterogeneous.
Inflation in Barbados is mainly imported. But how are external shocks transmitted to the domestic economy? Shouldn’t there be also a domestic component, albeit very small, given the presence of capital controls? We focus on short term dynamics and contribute to the existing literature in three ways: (i) we identify the process with which inflation expectations are likely to be formed in Barbados; (ii) we add forward looking inflation expectations as one of the main channels through which external monetary shocks are transmitted to the economy; and (iii) we measure the importance of domestic shocks. We find that due to the peg, forward-looking inflation expectations in the reserve currency country are an important component of the inflation expectation process in Barbados and that they are a key channel in the international monetary transmission mechanism. Domestic factors, mainly monetary shocks, also matter given the limited degree of monetary autonomy provided by capital controls.
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