How Persistent Low Returns Will Shape Saving and Retirement
Authors: Olivia S. Mitchell, Robert Clark, and Raimond Maurer – University of Pennsylvania, North Carolina State University, Goethe University
How Persistent Low Returns Will Shape Saving and Retirement explores how the weak capital market performance predicted for the next several years will shape pension saving, investment, and decumulation plans. Academics, policymakers, and industry leaders debate alternative strategies to cope with these challenges globally, as economic growth remains slow and low returns become the ‘new normal.’ This volume includes contributions from plan sponsors, benefit specialists, actuaries, academics, regulators, and others working to design resilient pensions for the next decades. Together, they identify several new tools for retirement savers and pension managers.
The Political Economy of Structural Reforms in Europe
Authors: Nauro F. Campos, Paul De Grauwe, and Yuemei Ji – Brunel University London, LSE, UCL
Reforms in labour and product markets play a central role in government policies. The Political Economy of Structural Reforms in Europe takes stock of current frontier work. It brings together leading contributions from academia, the central banks in Europe, and the OECD to argue that structural reforms can make a fundamental contribution to improve economic performance across Europe.
The Future of Capitalism
Author: Paul Collier – Oxford University
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. In a passionate and polemical book, Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts – economic, social and cultural – with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervour of ideological revivalism.
Collier – a distinguished economist whose career has centred on developing economies – expresses this critique with eloquence and conviction. He has a particular focus on the role of economic theory in validating self-serving behaviours such as bosses paying themselves hundreds of times more than their workers, and sketches an alternative approach to economics which embeds social norms and social influences on preferences. He blames the utilitarian and Rawlsian approaches to ethics, and advocates the communitarian alternative. I’m not persuaded by communitarianism, but surely you have to be pretty obtuse – a banker, maybe – to disagree with the diagnosis. Nobody thinks capitalism is doing just great at the moment.
Diane Coyle, Cambridge University
Fighting Financial Crises – Learning from the past
Authors: Gary B. Gordon, Ellis W. Tallman – Yale University, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Fighting Financial Crises thus turns to the past for a fuller understanding of our uncertain present, investigating how panics during the National Banking Era played out and how they were eventually quelled and prevented. Gorton and Tallman open with a survey of the period’s “information environment,” tracing the development of national bank notes, checks, and clearing houses to show how the key to keeping order was to disseminate information very carefully. Identifying the most effective responses based on the framework of the National Banking Era, they then consider the Fed’s and the SEC’s reactions to the recent crisis, building an informative new perspective on how the modern economy works.
Financial crises are complex economic and political events, and a historical perspective is essential. In this book, two of our best financial historians distill the key lessons for policy makers and practitioners from the US banking crises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their accounts of the crises are engaging and their analyses are insightful and persuasive.
Ben Bernanke, Brookings
