This study investigates whether the newly cultivated platform of volatility derivatives has altered the volatility of the underlying S&P500 index. The findings suggest that the onset of the volatility derivatives trading has lowered the volatility of both the cash market volatility and the cash...

The European market of banks and insurance companies has traditionally no exact boundaries between insurance and banking activities. Such business arena poses distinctive challenges to both banking and insurance industries. The paper statistically evaluates the feasibility of a hybrid portfolio...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the volatility of Greek interbank rates and the level of rates by estimating the important CKLS interest rate model using the estimation method of (Nowman, 1997). We also estimate the interest rate models of Merton, Vasicek, CIRSR, Dothan,...

One of the notable characteristics of modern financial markets is the convergence among financial institutions, which until recently preformed different tasks. To this end, the present study explores the bank-insurance phenomenon in the Greek market. It focuses on the development of financial...

This study uses the VAR-BEKK methodology to examine the relationship between equity returns and currency exposure for a sample of U.S., U.K. and Japanese banks and insurance firms during 2003-2011. The findings indicate that banks' equity returns are negatively related to changes in foreign...

We investigate the impact of domestic and international bank-insurance deals on the risk-return profiles of bidding banks, peer banks and peer insurers within a GARCH framework. We find that both announcing and non-announcing firms experience positive abnormal returns with the effect on insurer...

The chapter is organized as follows. The section “The Business Structure of Financial Conglomerates” provides an overarching discussion on the corporate structure of financial conglomerates along with some data on these institutions. The section “The Drivers of Financial Conglomerates”...

The European market of banks and insurance companies has traditionally no exact boundaries between insurance and banking activities. Such business arena poses distinctive challenges to both banking and insurance industries. The paper statistically evaluates the feasibility of a hybrid portfolio...

Behavioral finance endeavors to bridge the gap between finance and psychology. Now an established field, behavioral finance studies investor decision processes which in turn shed light on anomalies, i.e., departures from neoclassical finance theory. This paper is the summary of a panel...

The current study investigates the time-varying interest rate exposure of financial intermediaries (bank/insurance) across four major markets (i.e. U.S., UK, Japan and Europe) from October 2002 to December 2012. We use the two-factor term structure model to measure the changes in the level and...