This paper examines whether managers impact firm performance when their firms are in distress. We conservatively define managerial ability as the manager's capacity to deploy the firm's resources. We verify the validity of our metric using a manager-firm matched panel data set which allows us to...

In July of 1826, a financial panic on Wall Street caused several companies to fail abruptly and precipitated runs on two of New York City's fifteen banks. Life and Fire Insurance became the largest of the bankruptcies. In violation of New York's banking statutes, the firm had engaged in lending...

The failure of financial institutions is often depicted as an externally-driven event in which certain triggers almost inevitably lead to the collapse of the firm. In contrast, this paper views institutional failure as a multistage process in which precautionary measures taken by the firm can...

This paper studies the survival outcomes experienced over a 14-year period by a comprehensive sample of group-affiliated U.S. property-casualty insurance companies from 1994. While it is generally assumed that affiliate support enhances the financial strength of a subsidiary within a group, this...

As a result of Solvency II, academics and practitioners anticipate further consolidation in the insurance industry as the new regulatory framework rewards well-diversified insurers with lower capital requirements and challenges smaller insurers to meet the (operational) regulatory requirements....

We develop a new method of assessing conditional conservatism using more detailed data available from the insurance industry. We look at how conditional conservatism affects insolvency risk and the financial strength rating of property-liability (P&L) insurance companies. We also investigate how...

The previous performance evaluation studies towards non-life insurance companies emphasized on the comparative evaluation among public and private sector companies. Early detection and diagnosis of bankruptcy of insurance companies is much desirable due to their existence in highly competitive...

We introduce a new distance-to-default (DD) measure based on observable covariates, allowing us to bypass any model-based inference (e.g., Merton, 1974), that works well. It is based on the following result: The default event defined by endogenous credit-risk models, a sufficiently low asset...

The topic of insolvency risk in connection with life insurance companies has recently attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, the question is investigated of how the values of the equity and of the liability of a life insurance company are affected by the default risk and the choice...