Our study examines two aspects of life insurers’ exposure to the troubled residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) market. First, we develop and estimate a model that explains cross-sectional variation in RMBS exposure in terms of firm characteristics. We find that firms least likely to...

Few studies of pension funding consider the agency conflicts that might affect pension plan management and the role of pension plans within the overall capital structure of firms. The primary purpose of this study is to determine if a relation exists between the level of insider ownership and...

We consider a ruin model where the surplus process of an insurance company is constructed so that part of the current surplus is kept available at all times and the remaining part is invested. The former portion of the capital is called “liquid reserves.” In this paper, we study the expected...

Natural disasters can affect insurer share prices in two counterbalancing ways: (1) through the uncertainty regarding an insurer’s ability to handle loss claims and (2) through a potential increase in demand for insurance and/or increase in insurance rates. Given the historically catastrophic...

Canada modified the capital adequacy test for property/casualty insurers to align regulatory surplus and firm risk. We explore the impact of this change on insurer surplus holdings. We find firms have not changed the level of surplus in response to risk characteristics in the capital adequacy...

Hurricane models are a significant tool used in estimating loss costs in catastrophe-prone areas. While the major hurricane loss cost models consider a consistent set of factors, there are variations in how the factors are treated in the models. This can lead to considerable variation in the...

We investigate the significant effects of the September 11 attacks on the Japanese stock market, one of the largest markets in the world. Although several studies have examined the impact of the attacks on the domestic U.S. stock market, few studies have analyzed their impact on the foreign...

Prior literature has indicated some advantage to physician-directed insurers in the medical malpractice insurance market (Lei and Browne, 2008, and Lei and Schmit, 2008, 2010). We anticipate that these advantages lead to enhanced financial performance, and test that hypothesis. We note, however,...