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...

Prior research provides theoretical insight on factors likely to impact the decision to mitigate such as the degree of risk aversion, the cost of market insurance, and the cost of self insurance. We provide empirical evidence related to several hypotheses from the self insurance literature on...

Lawsuits alleging illegal and unethical insurance sales practices have received widespread publicity in recent years. Although many observers have argued that one source of ethical conflicts for insurance agents is the industry's reliance on straight commission compensation, there remains a...

The growing concern over market conduct issues in the life insurance industry necessitates adequate disclosure of important factors in the generation of life insurance surrender values. Although Chung and Skipper (1987) show that credited interest rates are significantly positively correlated...

There are large, upfront, fixed costs to writing a life insurance policy. Both agent commission and direct underwriting costs (e.g., fees for physicals and blood tests) are fully paid a few years into contracts that can last 10-30 years. Because of these upfront costs, insurers can actually lose...

In this article, we discuss the determination of the optimal capital level under the consideration of systemic risk. We establish several models for calculating optimal capital level in different conditions including without constraint, with constraints of the value of systemic risk (STVaR) and...