We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...

What is the cross-sectional relationship between financial leverage and expected equity returns? How is the empirical relationship associated with firm's financial decisions? This paper investigates the potential explanations for the flatness relation between financial leverage and expected...

In a risk-based portfolio, there is no explicit control for the performance per unit of risk taken. We propose a framework to evaluate the balance between risk and performance at both the portfolio and component level, and to tilt the risk-based portfolio weights towards a state in which the...