Ewald Engelen paper.PDF

Pension fund governance: moral imperatives, state regulation, and the market

Pension funds are remarkable institutions. Charged with the welfare of plan beneficiaries and retirees, they carry a heavy burden of responsibility. And yet, unlike many government institutions, they have considerable discretion in fulfilling their goals and objectives. Even if their independence is circumscribed by statutory requirements, their autonomy is a distinctive aspect of Anglo-America...

Stock exchange virtualisation and the decline of second-tier financial centres—the cases of Amsterdam and Frankfurt

International financial centres used to be stable economic clusters held together by the centripetal forces emanating from physical exchanges. However, given near complete ‘virtualisation’, these ‘anchors’ have gradually disappeared. As this article demonstrates, this has had telling consequences for second-tier financial centres like Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Empirically, the article adds cases...

Conor Vibert's Discussion Paper.PDF

Analysing the Changing Landscape of European Financial Centres: The Role of Financial Products and the Case of Amsterdam

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the re-emergence of debates about the reconfiguration of European financial geographies and the role of stock exchange mergers in this process. There has been, however, no systematic attempt to date to analyse such changes. This paper proposes a specific conceptual framework to explore these issues. It uses a product-based analysis to examine, in the con...

Pension Fund Engagement Chances and Limitations

In this paper the growing salience of what is called ‘pension fund engagement’ is critically assessed by means of a reconstruction of the failure of the Swedish Wage Earner Funds. The outcome of this assessment is sobering. Even under optimal political conditions pension savings proved to be too unwieldy to have any impact on the ownership structure of large publicly quoted corporations. Appare...