We study the implications of longevity shocks for corporate bond markets, corporate debt financing and investment through the lens of life insurers. Longevity shocks shift life insurers' demand for bonds of specific maturities. When longevity increases, life insurance companies increase their...

Weather risk affects agricultural production. Index insurance has been proposed to hedge against severe weather risk, but large basis risk and low demand accompany current piecewise-linear index insurance contracts. We propose embedding a neural network-based optimization scheme into an expected...

We propose a new reserve error measure net of loss development forecasting error using the most basic actuarial technique of estimating loss development. We argue that the proposed measure is better for capturing managerial discretion than the traditional reserve error measures due to its...

This paper explores the impact of capital adequacy requirements on the investment behavior of insurance companies from a new perspective. We specifically investigate one important feature of Risk-Based Capital (RBC) system, the square root rule in aggregating risk categories. We show that the...

This study examines whether the financial health of municipal bond investors can affect the municipal bond yield by especially focusing on the liquidity component. We find that the deterioration of the financial health of bond investors widens the liquidity spread of municipal bonds, and this...

We study how the return of internal capital markets (ICMs) and the risk of ICMs differ across three alternative organizational forms: publicly-held stock insurers, privately-held stock insurers and mutual insurers. Because of the different combination of owner, manager and customer functions,...

We test for the causal impact of analyst coverage on corporate risk-taking in the property and casualty insurance sector, using the exogenous change in analyst coverage introduced by broker closures and mergers. We find that a decrease in analyst coverage promotes an increase in insurers’...

In this study, we examine the effect of bank deregulation on corporate environmental performance. We use a unique dataset that contains rich information on firms' toxic emissions and exploit bank branching deregulation in China. We find that compared with firms with lower exposure, firms more...

We use individual level data from eight waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey during 1991-2011 to investigate age profiles of health expenditure for rural and urban residents in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Employing a two-part model, we find that health expenditure of rural...

Time-to-build, time-to-produce, and inventory have important implications for asset prices and quantity dynamics in a general equilibrium model with recursive preferences. Time-to-build captures the delay in transforming new investments into productive capital, and time-to-produce captures the...