Understanding how institutions were impacted by the financial crisis and how they responded is important for developing risk management plans that are capable of dealing with potential future crises. This paper therefore examines the impact of the financial crisis on U.S. life insurers and...

Analyzing the top 100 U.S. property-liability insurers, we find that the cost of equity capital is negatively related to insurers' underwriting performance, but not their investment performance. The difference is attributable to opaque insurer liabilities and investor learning. We also find that...