Catastrophe (Cat) bonds are insurance securitization vehicles which are supposed to transfer catastrophe-related underwriting risk from issuers to capital markets. This paper addresses key, unanswered questions concerning Cat bonds and offers the following results. First, our findings show firms...

Insurance is a key risk sharing mechanism that protects citizens and governments from the losses caused by natural catastrophes. Given the increase in the frequency and intensity of natural catastrophes over recent years, this paper analyzes the performance effects of mega-catastrophes for U.S....

Insurance securitization has long been hailed as an important tool to increase the underwriting capacity for companies exposed to catastrophe-related risks. However, global volumes of insurance securitization have remained surprisingly low to date which raises questions over its benefits. In...

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank's liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately...

We investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and firm risk. To identify a causal effect of gender on risk, we use a dynamic model that controls for reverse causality and for gender and risk being influenced by unobservable firm factors. We find no evidence that female...

We explore if sleep deprivation affects how investors react to relevant news. Using the transition to Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the spring as a disruption to sleeping patterns, we show that investors underreact to a firm’s earnings surprise in the days after the transition to DST. Further,...

We find that when more independent directors rank a directorship high, the firm-specific information content in a firm's stock price increases. Further, independent directors with high reputation incentives serve firms that voluntarily disclose more information and display lower crash risk. We...

Exploiting two quasi-natural experiments, we find that firms increase emissions of toxic pollution following decreases in analyst coverage. The effects are stronger for firms with low initial analyst coverage, poor corporate governance and firms subject to less stringent monitoring by...

We examine how information risk and transaction costs influence the initial and subsequent market reaction to earnings news. We find that the initial market reaction is higher per unit of earnings surprise for higher information risk firms (information content effect). Furthermore, it is...

This paper examines the relatively neglected link between dividend policy and institutional ownership. It is also the first example of using well-established dividend payout models to examine the potential association between ownership structures and dividend policy. Moreover, the paper presents...