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,...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

We examine the duration-driven trades of duration-sensitive strategic investors, i.e., pensions and life insurers. We use longevity shocks as an identification strategy. Longevity shocks affect these investors' liability durations and induce them to adjust their asset durations. When the...

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...