Capital structure and international debt shifting

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm's optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm's indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national and foreign tax rates. These differences matter as multinationals have an incentive to shift debt to high-tax countries. The predictions of the model are tested using a novel firm-level dataset for European multinationals and their subsidiaries, combined with newly collected data on the international tax treatment of dividend and interest streams. Our empirical results show that a foreign subsidiary's capital structure reflects local corporate tax rates as well as tax rate differences vis-à-vis the parent firm and other foreign subsidiaries, although the overall economic effect of taxes on leverage appears to be small. Ignoring the international debt shifting arising from differences in national tax rates would understate the impact of national taxes on debt policies by about 25%.     

保险税理论与实践研究——基于税法的视角

保险税制对保险业的健康发展和保险功能作用的有效发挥具有十分重要的作用,在当前我国经济体制改革逐步深化,市场经济体系日趋完善的背景下,将保险税制改革纳入保险业发展规划蓝图中符合各个主体的利益。本文从法学的角度,在分析我国保险税法规范现状的基础上,探索保险税的法理学原理并试图找到税法对保险业的激励途径。     

论保险公司关联交易的转让定价与监管

经济全球化下保险业的国际融合愈发突出。跨国保险公司设立境外子公司开展保险业务是国际保险市场一体化的重要形式。由于各个国家税法各不相同,主权国家税权的独立性使得跨国保险公司可以利用关联方交易中的转让定价规则降低或转移税赋。保险公司关联交易相对于其他行业而言交易业务比较特殊,保险监管只有结合关联方交易特点制定相关的转让定价管理规则,才能有效地维护国家税权,促进良性竞争和保障市场秩序。     

关于建立中国农业保险政策支持体系的思考

农业是国民经济的基础性产业,也是带有风险性的弱质产业,它发展的优劣直接制约着国民经济的发展。中国是农业灾害发生最为严重的国家之一,而农业保险是农业风险重要的控制方式,农业保险作为一项风险转嫁、损失分摊的经济补偿制度,己成为国际上主要的非价格农业保护工具之一,对保证农业生产的持续稳定发展有着十分重要的意义。面对国内外农业保险发展的新形势,如何开展政策性农业保险工作,建立一套具有较高保障能力和运转效率的农业保险支持体系,是摆在政府面前的一项重要的任务。     

Peer-to-Peer-Absicherung privater Risiken: Eine Exploration am Beispiel von Wildschaden

This paper examines the extent to which business model development is an effective method of surmounting market failure in the insurance industry. In particular, it endeavours to demonstrate that replacing the traditional relationship between the insured and the insurer with a bilateral agreement opens up new markets, thus enabling hitherto non-insurable risks to be covered by new peer-to-peer business models. The insurance against risks caused by wild animals was chosen as the empirical field, since it is known to be an area which exhibits market failure. Based on 16 episodic interviews with representatives of the hunting community, demand structures and relevant contextual factors are revealed and analysed in terms of risk coverage and claims management among community members. This paper thus proposes an alternative position to that of the traditional insurance business, in which cover is based on a large and diversified risk group.     

Betriebsunterbrechungsversicherung bei kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen

The business interruption caused by a property claim is an existential risk both for large industrial companies and for small to medium enterprises (SME). It is especially relevant for companies working on a more complex sales and production infrastructure. Statistics show that in case of a large property claim the cost of the accompanying business interruption claim frequently exceeds the property claim. In Germany, however, the share of companies opting for business interruption insurance is much smaller than those opting for property insurance. This is especially true for SME that can hardly cover the risk themselves. The goal of this paper is to analyze the insurance decision for a business interruption policy with a special focus on SME. As a database we use the results of a representative survey among 1802 German SME with up to 100 employees. Our results show that the decision for a business interruption policy is not only dependent on hard factors such as company size and industry, but also driven by the so-called “insurance mentality”, which includes risk aversion, insurance know-how and price-sensitivity.     

Bank profitability and taxation

This paper investigates how banks’ activity is affected by the corporate income tax. For this purpose it uses aggregate data on all main components of the profit and loss account and on the interest rate applied on loans and on deposits for the banking sector of the main industrialized countries during the period 1981–2003. With such information we are able to disentangle the extent to which a bank is able to shift its tax-burden forward to its borrowers, depositors, and purchasers of fee-generating services. The main result is that the taxation of banks’ profit is equivalent to a taxation on loans and as such it exerts a substantial impact on the composition of banking sector revenues. However credit intermediaries have the ability to shift a substantial part of their corporate income tax burden and therefore differences in the level of taxation cannot explain the dispersion observed in banks’ net profitability across industrialized countries.     

Opting for Opting‐In? An Evaluation of the European Commission's Proposals for Reforming VAT on Financial Services*

This paper provides a legal and economic analysis of the European Commission's recent proposals for reforming the application of VAT to financial services, with particular focus on their ‘third pillar’, under which firms would be allowed to opt in to taxation on exempt insurance and financial services. From a legal perspective, we show that the proposals’‘first and second pillars’ would give rise to considerable interpretative and qualification problems, resulting in as much complexity and legal uncertainty as the current regime. Equally, an option to tax could potentially follow significantly different legal designs, which would give rise to discrepancies in the application of the option amongst Member States of the European Union (EU). On the economic side, we show that quite generally, when firms cannot coordinate their behaviour, they have an individual incentive to opt in on business‐to‐business (B2B) transactions, but not on business‐to‐consumer (B2C) transactions. We also show that opting‐in eliminates the cost disadvantage that EU financial services firms face in competing with foreign firms for B2B sales. But these results do not hold if firms can coordinate their behaviour. An estimate of the upper bound on the amount of tax revenue that might be lost from allowing opting‐in is provided for a number of EU countries.     

Tax-tariff reform with costs of tax administration

As is broadly recognised, the straightforward application of the Diamond–Mirrlees (1971) production efficiency theorem implies that when lump-sum taxation is not available, then it is optimal for the government in a small open economy to rely on taxes on the net demand of households rather than on border taxes to finance its resource requirements. However, the theorem does not hold when taxation is associated with administrative costs. The present paper explores the implications for optimal taxation and for desirable directions of tax-tariff reform of taking into account the costs of tax administration in countries at different levels of economic development. The paper clarifies the reasons for, and lends support to, the criticism by Stiglitz (Presentation to Congress of International Institute of Public Finance, Prague, 2003) of the IMF and the World Bank’s recommendation to developing countries to adopt VAT to replace border taxes.      

养老保险税制的国际实践及启示

当前我国养老保险税制存在企业缴纳基本养老保险的税收优惠力度不够。企业年金税收政策不全面,个人储蓄性养老保险税制缺位,养老保险的税收监督政策不完美等问题。从国际比较角度看,鼓励性的养老保险税收政策总体上有利于扩大养老保险规模。因此。当前我国有必要加大企业缴纳基本养老保险的税收优惠力度,建立有利于调动个人建立企业年金和储蓄性养老保险的税制,同时,避免过度滥用税收优惠政策。     

The effect of regulation on optimal corporate pension risk

We study firms' pension prefunding and portfolio allocation choices in a model in which firms trade off the need to compensate workers for the financial risk in their pension benefit against the cost advantage that may be gained by exploiting underpriced pension insurance. In the absence of pension insurance, the firm minimizes costs by rendering promised benefits free of risk to workers, who are assumed to be unable to hedge firm-specific risk. Various forms of government intervention, such as benefit guarantees, can alter this outcome dramatically by providing the firm with an incentive to shift risk to other parties. In this case, we find that the firm's decisions depend on, among other influences, the degree of insurance mispricing, the amount of guaranteed benefits, the stringency of minimum funding requirements, and the costs of financial distress.     

How Country and Safety-Net Characteristics Affect Bank Risk-Shifting

Risk-shifting occurs when creditors or guarantors are exposed to loss without receiving adequate compensation. This paper seeks to measure and compare how well authorities in 56 countries controlled bank risk shifting during the 1990s. Although significant risk-shifting occurs on average, substantial variation exists in the effectiveness of risk control across countries. We find that the tendency for explicit deposit insurance to exacerbate risk shifting is tempered by incorporating loss-control features such as risk-sensitive premiums, coverage limits, and coinsurance. Introducing explicit deposit insurance has had adverse effects in environments that are low in political and economic freedom and high in corruption.     

EFFECTS OF THE EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION ON INSURANCE BUSINESS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Abstract: The European Monetary Union is intended to bring about a number of positive consequences, such as more effectiveness and lower cost in foreign trade, economic growth and – not least – an internationally competitive currency. In the short run, two of these effects are of particular interest, namely reduction of exchange rate risk and transaction cost. The paper first describes the scope of these problems, analyzing bid-ask spreads for EU-currencies and selected transaction costs. The particular prospects of insurance companies in EMU-countries depend mainly on their activities in foreign markets. We will therefore look into present foreign business in insurance and the relevance of the single currency for acquisition of production factors and capital investment decisions.     

我国保险产品结构的合理性分析

近年来,我国保险市场存在着产品结构不合理的现实问题,虽然强调"转方式、调结构",但主要是针对寿险业务结构的调整,并未注意到寿险业务与非寿险业务比例结构的合理性,财产保险市场发展薄弱.本文首先从产品保障功能的角度对产品结构合理性的衡量问题进行了讨论,引入了"非寿险业务占比"指标作为衡量保险业发展健康程度的指标.通过对国际...     

Electronic Business in der Versicherungswirtschaft

In the last years a fundamental shift took place in the competitive environment of the financial services industry which was mainly due to the development of the internet. Because of its high degree of information this industry seems to be particularly suitable for electronically based transactions. For this reason the article analyses possibilities for and potentials of the use of electronic business in the insurance industry. These possibilities and potentials could be found on every step of the value chain of firms in the insurance industrie so that there are many possibilities to improve efficiency. The use of electronic business also leads to an intermediation of the value chain and to the emergence of new business models in the environment of insurance firms.     

我国商业保险在老年产业中的商业机会探究

按照历史经验,商业保险公司的发展与其所在经济体中支柱性产业的发展密切相关.为探索我国老年产业的发展将对我国商业保险公司的发展所可能造成的影响,本文首先论证了我国老年产业将成为我国支柱性产业的可能性.并在此基础上,从扩展保费收入渠道以及扩展保险资金投资渠道两个方面,对商业保险公司在老年产业中的商业机会进行探讨.并就商业保...     

Labor supply and government programs: A cross-country analysis

There are substantial cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+). A theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle across European countries and the United States. The findings support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle in the European countries relative to the United States, with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects.     

InsurTech in the United States and Germany—What are the drivers behind the different business models?

Comparing the InsurTech ecosystems of the United States and Germany (Europe), there are significant regional differences in the choice of business models. While many InsurTechs in the United States have opted for the business model of a fully licensed insurer, this business model is much less common in Europe. In Europe, many InsurTechs seem to shy away from applying for a license as an insurer and limit themselves to the business model of a broker or a managing general agent. This paper analyzes the factors that influence an InsurTech's choice of business model when deciding whether or not to apply for an insurance license. It examines the impact of different local market environments on these decisions, as well as the role that access to venture capital plays in business model decisions and how regulators and their actions influence the decision-making process.     

Wandel der Beratungsqualität auf dem Versicherungsvermittlungsmarkt: Eine ökonomische Analyse der Veränderungen aufgrund der Anforderungen der EU-Vermittlerrichtlinie

The EU-Directive on insurance mediation has introduced an important and sustainable change to the insurance brokerage market with special regard to the quality of the consulting services. The restructuring is necessary due to the increased administration costs of the business accreditation in conjunction with the increased workload. Dependent on the remuneration system—a commission system vs. a fee vs. a mixed commission—, different scenarios for the market organization are possible. This has consequences for the distribution policy. In this situation, the most obvious model seems to be the one, where the insurance brokers specialize and provide only selected type of consulting services. Furthermore, the analysis shows possible influences of further regulation of the insurance brokerage market, which could result in an increase of brokerage costs. This paper continues the actual political discussions regarding the form and basis of remuneration.