BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are viewed currently as pillars of relative political, economic and financial stability, with the prospect of a major shift in future world power. The paper aims at investigating the relationships among the economic, financial and political...

In this paper we develop a framework for optimal investment decisions for insurance companies in the presence of (partially) unhedgeable risk. The perspective that we choose is from an insurance company that maximises the stream of dividends paid to its shareholders. The policy instruments that...

Prior studies suggest that directors' and officers' (D&O) insurance induces moral hazard and reduces incentives on behalf of stockholders. As a result, we argue that purchasing D&O insurance exhibits lower investment efficiency. Using data from Taiwan between 2008 and 2010, which is mandatorily...

Closed-form expressions for basic risk measures, such as value-at-risk and tail value-at-risk, are given for a family of statistical distributions that are specially suitable for right-skewed positive random variables. This is useful for risk aggregation in many insurance and financial...

We discuss risk measures representing the minimum amount of capital a financial institution needs to raise and invest in a pre-specified eligible asset to ensure it is adequately capitalized. Most of the literature has focused on cash-additive risk measures, for which the eligible asset is a...

We study capital requirements for bounded financial positions defined as the minimum amount of capital to invest in a chosen eligible asset targeting a pre-specified acceptability test. We allow for general acceptance sets and general eligible assets, including defaultable bonds. Since the...

This study deals with a specific implication of adverse selection for annuity pricing. Varying the time path of the payoffs over the retirement periods affects the annuity demand and welfare of individuals with low and with high life expectancy in different ways. Therefore they can be separated...

One criticism of the estate tax is that it prevents the owners of family businesses from passing their enterprises to their children. The problem is that it may be difficult to pay estate taxes without liquidating the business. A natural question is why individuals with such concerns do not...

Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial...