Two essays in finance: Market response to catastrophic losses on the insurance industry and return on investment of a land grant university

Based on data on publicly traded insurance firms, the first essay examines questions about the effect of large catastrophic events on insurance firms. Rather than looking at a single event, thirty catastrophic events were aggregated into quintiles and the cumulative abnormal returns around these events were found to be significantly positive over a 25 day trading window. There is no significant evidence that post-catastrophic stock returns are correlated to the magnitude of the catastrophe.