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...

A vast majority of insurers are regulated by each state in which they conduct business; however, a small subset of specialized firms, risk retention groups (RRGs), are largely exempt from most aspects of duplicative regulation no matter how many states they operate. This paper analyzes the...

This paper examines the effect of rate regulation on the management of the property-liability insurer loss reserve. The political cost hypothesis predicts that managers make accounting choices to reduce wealth transfers resulting from the regulatory process. Managers may under-state reserves to...

We study whether digital technology streamlines the regulatory process and reduces the costs of complying with regulation. To identify the effect of digital technology on regulatory compliance costs, we leverage a quasi-experimental policy change which mandates the use of an internet-based flow...

This paper provides a detailed description of a new measure of reserve error, the Full Information Reserve Error (FIRE), which was first proposed by Grace and Leverty (2018). We briefly describe the philosophy of FIRE and its advantages. We then present the details on how to calculate it. We...

We identify the effect of public guarantees on market discipline by exploiting the rich variation in U.S. state guarantees of property-liability insurer obligations. We find that insurer financing is significantly more risk-sensitive in the absence of government guarantees. The effects are...

Corporate control theory suggests mergers and acquisitions protect shareholder value by allowing good managers to take control of the assets of bad managers. It therefore predicts (1) the acquisitions of poorly-managed targets by well-managed bidders will create more value than other...

We use two reserve error definitions found in the literature to investigate the joint impact of previously studied incentives on the magnitude of reserve error. We find many prior conclusions are dependent upon the restricted setting in which the hypotheses are tested and on the definition of...