The variation in the degree of price regulation in the property-liability insurance market in Canada varies across time and space, creating an opportunity to test a recurring theory in regulatory economics: that price regulated firms have higher levels of financial leverage. Using an...

This paper investigates strategic brinksmanship between regulated property-liability insurance firms and their regulators. Prior research suggests that firms increase their financial leverage, and thus their probability of bankruptcy and expected bankruptcy costs, in order to mitigate the...

The text explores generally whether recommendations relating to deposit insurance are international guidleines or mandatory rules, explores the role of deposit insurance as one of several elements in the financial safety net, and offers an outlook to a future with more research and cross-border...

In this paper we treat economic and legal advantages to firms in business financing through the issuance of bonds. Besides theoretical analysis paper includes the empirical analysis, a survey conducted in 50 businesses, including individual businesses and corporations, about the types of...

This paper reviews recent research at the intersection of industrial organization and corporate finance on credit default swap (CDS) markets. These markets have been at the center of the financial crisis of 2007–09 and many aspects of their operation are not well understood. The paper covers...

Catastrophe (Cat) bonds are insurance securitization vehicles which are supposed to transfer catastrophe-related underwriting risk from issuers to capital markets. This paper addresses key, unanswered questions concerning Cat bonds and offers the following results. First, our findings show firms...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

Abstract Medical bankruptcy was at the heart of the health care reform debate. According to Himmelstein et al. (2009), 62.1 percent of bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were due to medical reasons. At the same time over 15 percent of Americans had no health insurance. The 2010 health...

Anecdotal evidence and several observational studies suggest that out-of-pocket medical costs are pivotal in a large fraction of consumer bankruptcy decisions. In this paper, we assess the contribution of medical costs to household bankruptcy risk by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in...

In this paper, we consider a general Lévy risk model with two-sided jumps and a constant dividend barrier. We connect the ruin problem of the ex-dividend risk process with the first passage problem of the Lévy process reflected at its running maximum. We prove that if the positive jumps of the...