Pooling Money

One of the first rules of investing is diversification: spreading resources over many types of investments in order to minimize financial risk. Mutual funds have been the diversification vehicle of choice for the last several decades. In recent years, however, other opportunities for diversification—such as separately managed accounts and exchange-traded funds—have enjoyed rapid growth. What lies ahead for the mutual fund industry in light of this increasingly competitive environment? In this volume, experts from the United States and Japan look at forces of change in their securities markets and offer their views of the future for mutual funds and other forms of securities diversification.

Contributors include Harold Bradley (Kauffman Foundation), Koichi Iwai (Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research),Ajay Khorana (Georgia Institute of Technology),Allan Mostoff (Mutual Fund Directors Forum), Brian Reid (Investment Company Institute), Henri Servaes (London Business School), Paula Tkac (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), and Peter Wallison (American Enterprise Institute).

Yasuyuki Fuchita is a senior managing director at the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research in Tokyo. He is coeditor of After the Crash: The Future of Finance (2010) and Prudent Lending Restored (2009), both published by Brookings. Robert E. Litan is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. Among his many books is Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (Yale University Press, 2007), written with William J. Baumol and Carl J. Schramm.