This article builds on Froot and Stein in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: (i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market as...

Prior literature provides support both for the existence of target capital structures and internal capital markets (ICM). The issue of whether firms use internal capital to reduce deviations from target capital structures, however, has yet to be examined. We provide the first empirical evidence...

We use a unique dataset of product warranty offerings by firms to investigate the effect of a firm's warranty reserve levels on its capital structure decisions. Our sample consists of firms that (i) offer explicit warranties, (ii) likely offer implicit product warranties, and (iii) are in...

Using data on balance sheets of both financial and nonfinancial sectors of the economy, we use a "demand system" approach to study how lender composition and willingness to provide credit affect the relationship between credit expansions and real activity. A key advantage of jointly modeling the...

The frequency with which firms adjust output prices helps explain persistent differences in capital structure across firms. Unconditionally, the most exible-price firms have a 19% higher long-term leverage ratio than the most sticky-price firms, controlling for known determinants of capital...

Mutual insurance companies and stock insurance companies are different forms of organized risk sharing: policyholders and owners are two distinct groups in a stock insurer, while they are one and the same in a mutual. This distinction is relevant to raising capital, selling policies, and sharing...

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...

Homeowners’ insurance provides households financial protection from climate losses. To improve access and affordability, state regulators impose price controls on insurance companies. Using novel data, we construct a new measure of rate setting frictions for individual states and show that...

The Solvency II standard formula measures interest rate risk based on two stress scenarios which are supposed to reflect the 1-in-200 year event over a 12-month time horizon. The calibration of these scenarios appears much too optimistic when comparing them against historical yield curve...

Purpose: Operational risks appear as the main threats of the modern world. Mistakes made by employees, an imperfect information systems or changes in the law can cause losses that businesses today are not even able to estimate. Therefore, in the face of widespread the asymmetry of information,...