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...

This paper presents a model that measures the impact of political risk on portfolio investment when the political risks are multivariate and correlated across countries. The multivariate approach generalizes the single country model but retains most of its characteristics in terms of its ability...

The current financial crisis had an important impact on economies all over the world. Romania – one of the Eastern European countries, considered just one year ago to have a good growth potential – is also absorbing the shock waves of this crisis. As expected, the first to respond to those...

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...

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...

In a two-period model with uncertainty about life expectancy, we analyze several measures that are typically included in a social security reform: tax incentives for private life annuities, a cut in the social security benefits, and an increase in the social security tax. First, we look at the...

This paper analyzes equilibrium health insurance premium dependencies on signaling costs given individual health states, risk types, and risk type attributes. Since precise determination of an individual's premium is costly, insurers can categorize insureds based on relative screening costs. We...

This paper proposes an insurance scheme to protect a currency from self-fulfilling financial crises. Treating such crises as catastrophes, the recently developed catastrophe insurance bond (CAT bond) can be adapted and applied. The idea is for the insured currency area to issue bonds with an...