Banks' fundamental concept relies on public trust. Since banks are also called the fiduciary financial institutions, public trust plays as an important role in the banking industry. This is mainly due to the fact that banks do not actually manage their own money. Instead, banks manage public...

Risk-return association is one of the major concerns for economics and business disciplines. While the standard economics and finance theory assume that the sign of the relationship should be positive (individuals are assumed to be risk adverse), since Bowman (1980) many researchers have found...

Firms, insurance companies, pension funds, and broadly speaking the international community focus already their engagement activities on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues since it can create long-term shareholder value, by determining the future performance of markets. Indeed ESG...

Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

This article applies a unique accruals measure to empirically test whether accruals quality affects the cost of capital for property-liability insurers. We utilize insurer loss reserve errors to accurately measure the quality of accruals. This measure, as well as conventional accruals measures,...

Risk parity is an asset allocation strategy designed so each asset class contributes equally to overall portfolio risk (as measured by volatility). While risk parity offers potential advantages, its success hinges on key assumptions and a favorable environment for bonds. Like the traditional...

We propose a novel corporate social responsibility (CSR) index that captures various aspects of an insurer's internal and external CSR activities. We first show that insurers worldwide have significantly increased their CSR activities with the average index value almost doubling between 2006 and...

This paper used the composite construction method proposed by Haugen (1999) and its application by Zhao and Wang (2010) for the Chinese stock market. Utilizing the Shanghai A-share market stocks data, this paper first selected the shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange during January 1,...

One of the most prominent contemporary success stories is tourism. This industry began to significantly increase only in 1960, and during the last 50 years, tourism revenues and number of outgoing people have increased by a number of times. Therefore, the tourism sector is highly attractive to...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the scope for international private standards to play a role in reducing business risk. Business risk is measured as variability in revenue, customer base, informal payments, and temporary firm closure. The results show lower levels of business risk...