The financial crisis has created and revealed economic vulnerabilities of modern societies, which countries had assumed that they had overcome a long time ago. It brought back parallels to the Great Depression in Europe and North America. The gravity of the effects of the financial crisis contrasts strikingly with the limited attempts to analyse the causes and dynamics and to learn lessons from it. However, much of the recent debate has paid insufficient attention to wider aspects that contributed to the financial crisis, namely the role of the state towards financial markets, such as the reliance on the financial sector in the provision of public pensions. In the proposed panel, the papers argue that specific policies (regulation, pensions, reform policies) play a crucial role for the working and taming of financial markets and the sustainability of pension systems (and political economies more generally).

Governments supported more private provision of old-age security. This exposed pensions to the volatility of financial markets. The papers’ central questions are how and why pension reforms came to rely more on financial markets, who was meant to bear the risks, and why the effects of the financial crisis vary for different pension funds and regulations.

The comparison of selected OECD countries shows the interaction of pension privatisation as part of a system of income support with financial market regulation that attracts and is supported by certain stakeholders. The EU adds an additional layer of regulatory activity and financial market integration, which some papers take into account.