We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

We present a model for P/L insurance companies based on Asset-Liability-Management (ALM). We show analytically for multivariate normal distributed assets and claims that an overall minimum of the required risk capital can be obtained by refining the firm's asset allocation when including a ruin...

In 2003, Swiss Re introduced a mortality-based security designed to hedge excessive mortality changes for its life book of business. The concern was apparently brevity risk, i.e., the risk of premature death. The brevity risk due to a pandemic is similar to the property risk associated with...

This paper investigates corporate hedging under regret aversion. Regret-averse firms try to avoid deviations of their hedging policy from the ex post best policy, an intuitive consideration if one has to justify one's decisions afterward. The study presents a model of a firm that faces uncertain...

In contrast to the U.S., many executive managers of continental European firms have a PhD. In this paper we analyze if a research-oriented background in the form of a PhD is linked to the corporate decision-making of CFOs in the use of foreign exchange (FX) derivatives in Germany. After...

Even though financial risk management has the ability to generate value, the use of financial derivatives among nonfinancial corporations remains limited. We identify a channel that contributes to this limited use: the decoupling of derivatives losses and operational gains. Specifically, firms...

We examine the determinants of corporate speculation and challenge the extant, conflicting evidence. Separating risk management (reducing currency-specific FX exposure) from speculation (increasing or holding currency-specific FX exposure constant), we provide unprecedented evidence that...

For many years the longevity risk of individuals has been underestimated as survival probabilities improved across the developed world. The uncertainty and volatility of future longevity has posed significant risk issues for both individuals and product providers of annuities and pensions. This...

Adverse weather related risk is a main source of crop production loss and a big concern for agricultural insurers and reinsurers. In response, weather risk hedging may be valuable, however, due to basis risk it has been largely unsuccessful to date. This research proposes the Levy subordinated...

Developing a liquid longevity market requires reliable and well-designed financial instruments. An index-based longevity swap and a cap are analyzed in this paper under a tractable stochastic mortality model. The model is calibrated using Australian mortality data and analytical formulas for...