Universal banking is an alternative mechanism to a stock market for risk-sharing, for providing information for guiding investment, and for contesting corporate governance. In Germany, where the stock market has historically been small, banks hold equity stakes in firms and have proxy voting...

A Bayesian model of developing aggregate loss triangles in property casualty insurance is introduced. This model makes use of a heteroskedastic and skewed t-likelihood with endogenous degrees of freedom, employs model averaging by means of Reversible Jump MCMC, and accommodates a structural...

Who should control the firm? What should be the firm's objective function? If contracts are incomplete, then the group of input providers that most needs their interests protected should be allocated control rights to the firm. Existing theories argue that the suppliers of capital are most in...

The time series properties of the growth rates of BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) workplace injury and illness incidence rates are analyzed for manufacturing (1927-2007) and all private industry (1973-2007). These growth rates exhibit a negative (time varying) mean and a pro cyclical response...

The influence of age on Group Health medical claims is analyzed for a large data set provided by the Society of Actuaries. This data set comprises claims for the years 1997 through 1999, with a total claim count of about 4.3 million and total paid charges of approximately $7 billion. Using...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

Economic news affects the perceptions of investors, forecasters, and policymakers about the strength or weakness of the economy. These expectations are updated on the basis of regularly occurring surprises in macroeconomic announcement data. The response of asset prices to positive or negative...