This paper is the first to examine the effects of consolidation in the international insurance industry on the acquirers' contribution to systemic risk. We analyze a sample of 394 international domestic and cross-border mergers and find a strong positive relation between consolidation in the...

We propose a novel corporate social responsibility (CSR) index that captures various aspects of an insurer's internal and external CSR activities. We first show that insurers worldwide have significantly increased their CSR activities with the average index value almost doubling between 2006 and...

We show that the information on derivatives usage and securitization activities of U.S. banks as disclosed in their pre-crisis 10-K filings predicts their systemic equity risk during the financial crisis. Investors predominantly exited stocks of banks that had previously disclosed a more...