One of the most contentious issues raised during the recent crisis has been the potentially exacerbating role played by mark-to-market accounting. Many have proposed the use of historical cost accounting, promoting its ability to avoid the amplification of systemic risk. We caution against...

This paper examines the choice of tools for managing a firm’s operational risks: cash reserves, insurance contracts, and financial assets under an optimal financing contract that solves moral hazard between insiders and outside investors. Risk management is valuable as it reduces the costs of...

We provide a novel benefit of "Alternative Risk Transfer" (ART) products with parametric or index triggers. When a reinsurer has private information about his client’s risk, outside reinsurers will price their reinsurance offer less aggressively. Outsiders are subject to adverse selection as...

Given the opportunity to buy IPO shares of uncertain value at a fixed price, potentially informed investors have an incentive to refuse to participate in offerings the underwriter happens to overprice. We show that an underwriter can efficiently resolve this problem by entering into a repeat...

Ambivalence in the regulatory definition of capital adequacy for credit risk has recently stirred the financial services industry to collateral loan obligations (CLOs) as an important balance sheet management tool. CLOs represent a specialised form of Asset-Backed Securitisation (ABS), with...

A bank can efficiently underwrite individually difficult to value IPOs by offering them as a package deal to a stable coalition of investors (block-booking). Block-booking banks set offer prices to equalize downside risk across their offerings, not expected returns. Examining US IPOs over the...

Multi-year insurance has been proposed as a tool to incentivise policy-holders to invest in property-level adaptation. In a world of rising natural catastrophe risks, such autonomous adaptations could have significant benefits for the property owner, the insurer and society. We review some...

We investigate the effects of regulatory restrictions on the amounts invested in risky asset classes in life insurance funds across EU countries. By estimating a panel data econometric model, we find that these restrictions have an economically and statistically significant negative impact on...

Climate change adaptation is an increasingly important field and will involve a range of actors from national governments to private companies, communities and households. There is a growing policy discourse supporting the involvement of the private sector in adaptation, however there is little...

Extreme weather events represent the earliest, and in some places most significant, threats to the most vulnerable countries that are driven by climate change. An outcome of the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change...