Excerpt: National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems has published a new Research Series paper entitled The Advantages of Using Conventional Actuarial Approaches in Valuing Public Pension Plans. Financial economics is a branch of economics that studies capital markets, examining why people invest, how investments should be valued and how investment risk and return should be measured. Over the past decade, adherents to these theories have successfully advocated applying principles of financial economics to corporate pension plans through calculation of a 'market value liability.'  MORE >>