A sovereign debt crisis can have significant knock-on effects in the financial markets and put financial stability at risk. This paper focuses on the transmission of sovereign risk to insurance companies as some of the largest institutional investors in the sovereign bond market. We use a firm...

This paper is to examine life insurance companies in the OECD countries to identify the major firm-specific determinants of the profitability and test the impact of regulatory system in those countries. We consider two important agency structures of insurance industry supervision and...

Natural disasters resulting in significant losses have become more frequent in recent decades, with 2011 being the costliest year in history. This feature explores how risk is transferred within and beyond the global insurance sector and assesses the financial linkages that arise in the process....

The global insurance industry is undergoing fundamental change, with countries that are classified as emerging economies (such as China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region) playing increasingly important roles. In this article, we investigate the effect of two important dimensions of...

Extreme events are becoming more frequent and intense, inflating the economic damages and social hardship set-off by natural catastrophes. Amidst budgetary cuts, there is a growing concern on societies' ability to design solvent disaster recovery strategies, while addressing equity and...

The concept of a market portfolio plays an important role in many financial theories and models. Knowledge of each asset's share of the invested capital markets is both useful information and a good starting point for investors considering the appropriate allocation to the asset. In our latest...

This research explores two aspects of European insurers' investment behaviour related to crises. While they are often considered as financial market stabilisers and long-term investors, there is currently a lack of knowledge about insurers' investment behaviour in crises under the regulatory...

This paper provides a review of the alternative investments literature in emerging markets, with a focus on art and wine, angel investment, venture capital and private equity, private debt, hedge funds, crowdfunding, and IPOs. We show that there has been relatively more growth in the scholarly...