We study how the urban context of a disaster affects protection decisions against catastrophes using the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which is highly relevant to urban life but difficult to link with rural life. We use a Bayesian approach to identify regions with major cities where the sensitivities of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether insurers could have a strong motivation for M&A in the future because they need to survive within the industry under oversaturated market conditions. Recently, Japanese non‐life insurance markets, mainly the automobile insurance...

A regime shift in the inflation process is the collective outcome of shifts in individual agents' rational expectations resulting from an important policy initiative. Taking this view, we find decisive evidence of a shift in the inflation process during the Volcker experiment reflecting the...

In portfolio risk minimization, the inverse covariance matrix prescribes the hedge trades in which a stock is hedged by all the other stocks in the portfolio. In practice with finite samples, however, multicollinearity makes the hedge trades too unstable and unreliable. By shrinking trade sizes...

Conducting a Beveridge-Nelson decomposition on exchange rates reveals that the prospective interest rate differential -- the expected infinite sum of future interest rate differentials (i.e., the "prospective'') -- can help predict foreign exchange market excess returns. We find that the...

When a firm exercises discretion to disclose or withhold information (strategic disclosure), risk-averse investors command higher expected returns when expected cash flows decrease, producing a negative correlation between these expectations. Moreover, stock returns exhibit stronger reversal...

When a firm exercises discretion to disclose or withhold information (strategic disclosure), risk-averse investors command higher expected returns when expected cash flows decrease, producing a negative correlation between these expectations. Moreover, stock returns exhibit stronger reversal...

We find that between 20 and 25 percent of the negative covariance between excess returns and inflation is explained by shocks to monetary policy variables. The finding is robust to changes in the monetary policy rule that have occurred during the 1966-2000 period. The result contradicts the...

We find that between 20 and 25 percent of the negative covariance between excess returns and inflation is explained by shocks to monetary policy variables. The finding is robust to changes in the monetary policy rule that have occured during the 1966-1998 period. The result contradicts the...