Private Hochwasservorsorge und Elementarschadenversicherung

In light of increasing flood damage, private flood mitigation gains more relevance. We investigate empirically whether the uptake of private flood mitigation measures in Germany is affected by (a) the perceived flood insurance coverage, and (b) public information campaigns focussing on flood hazards. We use a novel longitudinal dataset of more than 3200 households and employ a difference-in-differences estimation approach. The results show that households who state a change in their insurance status and report themselves as being insured mitigate more, not less. This contradicts the expectation of moral hazard and suggests that insurance and mitigation are rather seen as complements than substitutes. Moreover, the survey data suggest that many households falsely expect being flood-insured. Public information campaigns show no measurable effect on the flood mitigation behaviour of households, which poses questions about the effectiveness of large-scale information campaigns. In tendency, our results support the idea of compulsory flood insurance.     

The determinants of integrating policy-based and community-based adaptation into coastal hazard risk management: a resilience approach

Abstract

A growing number of studies focus on improving the understanding of how the households’ adaptations can be encouraged in the process of coastal hazards and risk management. Particularly, this process is undergoing a major paradigm shift as it moves from an approach dominated by policy-based adaptation to another one in which community-based resilience building is favored. Thus, this article aims to apply a resilience approach to improve the knowledge about how public measures influence private autonomous adaptation behavior, through a transdisciplinary investigation of household adaptation behavior and its determinants. The Resilience Framework of Household Autonomous Adaptation to Climate- and Weather-Related Hazard Risks (ROHACHR) is proposed and combined with a focus group meeting and multivariate analysis to compare pre-disaster, during a disaster, post-disaster adaptations, and resilience behavior of households. Using an empirical survey of the households in three coastal municipalities in Taiwan, we examine the relationships between public measures and private adaptations that provides three distinguishing types of household behavior: ‘core’, ‘trust in governmental aid’, and ‘awareness and structures’. Results show that providing hazard risk information may be one step toward encouraging private autonomous adaptations. Several factors that help foster resilience also appear to be influential in households’ adaptation decisions, such as specific and positive governmental aid, information trust, and social capital. Based on these results, it shows that the ROHACHR is useful to characterize households’ adaptation and resilience behavior and explain how they respond to public measures. Finally, the policy implications of our findings for improving resilience of coastal communities and encouraging public-private collaboration in the process of hazard risk management are discussed.     

基于Logistic回归的陕西农村家庭致贫因素分析

贫困的发生是制度、环境、文化、人力资本、社会资本等多个因素综合循环作用的结果。陕西省是我国农村贫困最集中的省区之一。为使农村摆脱贫困落后面貌,提出切实可行的反贫困措施,科学揭示农村家庭致贫因素就显得十分重要。本文以国家级贫困县——陕西省淳化县的问卷调查结果为基础,运用logistic回归,从个人、家庭、社区和国家政策四个层面分析了陕西农村家庭的致贫因素,并提出了相应措施。     

Collective efficacy and natural hazards: differing roles of social cohesion and task-specific efficacy in shaping risk and coping beliefs

Abstract

Previous research in non-disaster contexts has shown that the concept of collective efficacy, which is a group’s sense of its ability to achieve a specific objective, assists understanding of community readiness and households’ decisions to take preparedness actions. Collective efficacy expands the concept of social capital, which refers to social resources such as trust, norms and networks, by addressing how likely communities are to activate these resources for specific tasks. This paper empirically investigates the effect of three distinct collective efficacy components on risk perception, fear and self-efficacy regarding natural hazards in Austria. The three components have differing impacts on risk and coping beliefs: (1) Social cohesion decreases risk perception and fear but has no effect on self-efficacy; (2) Efficacy belief in social support increases self-efficacy; (3) Efficacy belief in citizen groups increases risk perception and fear. The combination of efficacy belief in social support and citizen groups seems to be most promising for stimulating protective action, as they together promote both risk and coping appraisal. However, overreliance on social support may have the undesirable effect of creating a false sense of safety among disaster-prone households. The findings demonstrate that collective efficacy provides a meaningful perspective from which to examine risk and coping beliefs but caution against treating it as an umbrella concept, given the differing effects of its components. Future studies are needed to investigate the impact of collective efficacy on other key explanatory factors of protective action, such as response efficacy or non-protective responses.     

The decision game: a serious game approach to understanding environmental risk management decisions

Abstract

Here we describe the implementation of an experimental research tool called the Decision Game that we used to collect data on household flood risk management decisions. Participants using this tool play an interactive game that involves making household decisions about place of residence and a variety of household expenditures, including spending on flood insurance and private flood risk mitigation. Participants also answer survey questions before and after playing the game; the pre-game survey collected demographic information, and the post-game survey collected information about participant experiences with flooding and flood mitigation. Online and face-to-face participants showed similar engagement with the experiment, and most participants appeared to have made deliberate and considered decisions about risk mitigation. Online study participants had similar responses to those who participated in person, although face-to-face participants seemed slightly more likely to mitigate against risk. Overall, participants in this research were younger, more educated and more likely to rent a home than the average Canadian. Serious games may be useful for augmenting existing data gathering strategies used in understanding environmental decision making, particularly for rare catastrophic events for which stated preference surveys may be less informative. Serious games allow for sharing a mixture of information with study participants, including maps, video clips, text and even immersive 3D experiences, and can be administered online to increase participation levels. Future research will consider longer duration online experiments and more immersive interaction frameworks.     

Enhancing bank transparency: Financial reporting quality,fraudulent peers and social capital

This study examines the role of social norms in financial markets by relating bank transparency to social capital. Using comprehensive data on commercial banks, we provide empirical evidence that high social capital contributes to more transparent financial reporting, thereby enabling more precise risk assessments and promoting financial stability. We find that the effect of social capital is more pronounced when commercial banks are more complex and disclosure incentives of bank managers are strong. Our results suggest that more opaque reporting by peers explains lower transparency but financial misreporting is less contagious when social capital is high. Our study suggests that social capital can effectively improve reporting transparency when other mechanisms are not effective, thus securing financial system stability.     

Coping with risk: analysis on the importance of integrating social perceptions on flood risk into management mechanisms – the case of the municipality of Águeda,Portugal

The paper reflects on how populations prone to flood risk perceive such hazards and the way this perception has or has not been incorporated into the measures and mechanisms of flood risk management. The frequent occurrence of flooding, as well as the population's vulnerability and exposure to this risk, shows that the municipality of Águeda is a paradigmatic case for analysis of these issues. Similar to the rest of the country, the municipality of Águeda has been neglecting the multidimensional nature of flood risk. The data collected present some disparity between the proposals and technical perspectives regarding the management and mitigation of flood risk and the perception of local populations. In addition, neither knowledge of social perception of flood risk nor of the local communities is being integrated in a substantial and pro‐active way, whether in the processes of policy‐making or in the implementation of these policies. Empirical evidence equally shows that there is a clear tendency towards acceptance and coping with flood risk by the population in the municipality of Águeda. This seems to be connected to the local populations' recognition that though it is impossible to eliminate risk, there are at the same time advantages to occupying the floodplains.     

Audit committees’ social capital and financial reporting quality

We draw on social capital theory to examine the relationship between audit committee (AC) members’ social capital and financial reporting quality. Using US data for the period 2001–2010, our results suggest that non-AC directors’ social capital does not appear to be relevant to financial reporting quality. As far as AC members are concerned, our findings show a negative relationship between their social capital and financial reporting quality, suggesting a ‘dark side’ to social capital. Specifically, we find that sitting in multiple ACs (centrality) has a negative impact on reporting quality only for those AC members designated as financial experts. When other proxies for social capital are considered (connectedness, brokerage position and strong ties), our results show that the quality of financial reporting significantly decreases with the social capital of non-financial experts sitting in the AC. We contribute to prior research by: (i) relying on social capital theory, which is widely neglected in accounting research, (ii) using multiple metrics to capture the complex dimensions of social capital, and (iii) discriminating between the effects of financial and non-financial experts’ social capital on reporting quality. Our results suggest policy-makers might wish to limit financial experts’ multiple directorships as well as assess the actual contribution of non-financial experts to AC effectiveness.     

The Effectiveness of Public and Private Sector Summary Risk Measures in Predicting Insurer Insolvencies

This article investigates the abilities of four key summary risk measures to predict property-liability insurer insolvencies. The four summary risk measures studied are the NAIC's risk-based capital ratios, the NAIC's financial analysis solvency tools (FAST) scores, A.M. Best's Capital Adequacy Relativity ratios, and A.M. Best's ratings. The empirical tests find that the risk measures produced by the private sector are superior in predictive ability to the measures produced by regulators, perhaps because of the qualitative adjustments made by private sector analysts. The results also demonstrate that overall measures of risk are substantially better than risk-based capital measures in predicting insolvencies. Another finding is that the predictive ability of the NAIC's RBC ratios can be improved substantially if ranks are used rather than the ratios themselves.     

Social Risk Management: A New Conceptual Framework for Social Protection, and Beyond

This paper proposes a new definition and conceptual framework for Social Protection grounded in Social Risk Management. The concept repositions the traditional areas of Social Protection (labor market intervention, social insurance and social safety nets) in a framework that includes three strategies to deal with risk (prevention, mitigation and coping), three levels of formality of risk management (informal, market-based, public) and many actors (individuals, households, communities, NGOs, governments at various levels and international organizations) against the background of asymmetric information and different types of risk. This expanded view of Social Protection emphasizes the double role of risk management instruments—protecting basic livelihood as well as promoting risk taking. It focuses specifically on the poor since they are the most vulnerable to risk and typically lack appropriate risk management instruments, which constrains them from engaging in riskier but also higher return activities and hence gradually moving out of chronic poverty.     

民间资本参与社会养老服务提供的制度政策分析

我国人口老龄化发展速度加快,社会养老服务供需不平衡的矛盾凸显。机构养老的“补充”地位已经远远不能满足养老服务的实际需求。民间资本在市场需求和政府政策激励下,正越来越多地投入到社会养老服务提供中。但民间资本在参与养老服务提供的过程中面临一系列制度和政策方面的问题,影响了其参与养老服务提供的积极性。本文在对内蒙古部分民办养老机构实地调查的基础上,对相关问题进行了分析,并提出了一些对策和建议。     

Local social environment and the speed of leverage adjustment

This study examines the impact of social capital on firms’ leverage adjustment speed. Using a comprehensive dataset of 83,374 firm-year observations for 744 US counties for 1990–2016, we find that both underleveraged and overleveraged firms located in US counties with higher levels of social capital incur slower leverage adjustment towards their optimal target capital structure. This finding is robust to alternative measures of leverage and social capital, different model specifications, controlling for county- and firm-level characteristics, and endogeneity. We further identify two mechanisms through which social capital affects leverage adjustments: monitoring (channel for underleveraged firms) and disciplinary (channel for overleveraged firms) mechanisms.     

Managerial Social Capital and Financial Development: A Cross‐Country Analysis

This study examines the issue of whether managerial social capital, defined as aggregate benefits of social obligations and informal contacts formed through social networks, has an impact on financial development. Utilizing a large cross‐country sample for the period 1999–2012, we provide evidence that higher levels of social capital have a positive effect on financial development. We are able to examine different types of social connections for our sample firms and find that informal and nonprofessional relationships matter the most for financial market development. These findings are robust to alternative model specifications, variable measurement, and estimation techniques.     

Cost of capital and valuation in the public and private sectors: Tax,risk and debt capacity

Cost of capital and valuation differ in the private and public sectors, because taxes are a cost to the private sector but are only a transfer to the public sector. We show how to transform the after-tax private sector cost of capital into its pre-tax equivalent, for comparison with the public sector cost of capital. We establish the existence of a tax induced wedge between these two costs of capital. The wedge introduces a preference on the part of the private sector for assets with rapid tax depreciation, high debt capacity and low risk. We show that, in circumstances where an asset has identical public and private sector valuation in the absence of taxes, the tax induced difference in valuation is identical to the change in government tax receipts that results from having the asset owned by the private rather than the public sector. We provide some examples of distortions that result from failure to adjust for changes in tax revenues, and show how to effect such adjustment.     

资本运行范围拓展视域下的我国民间资本运行研究

资本顺利运行须摆脱＂布罗代尔的钟罩＂,才能踏步前行。当前民间资本已经成为我国经济社会发展的重要力量,但其运行范围仍须拓展。目前来看,我国民间资本运行中各类壁垒仍然存在,也日益引起我国学界和政府的高度重视,政府业已出台＂新36条＂为民间资本运行提供顺畅的发展条件。但为了进一步发挥民间资本促进我国经济社会发展的重要作用,仍须进行进一步的政策调整和完善,构建一整套合理、规范、有序的有关民间资本运行的相关制度体系,并进行对应的配套改革。     

Social Capital and Housing Affordability: Evidence from China

This article attempts to examine the problem of housing affordability in China based on a set of household-level survey data. In contrast to the previous studies, our study focuses on the important implication of social capital for households’ house-purchasing decisions in this country. Our results show that household expenditures on the relations with parents and other relatives are important determinants for homeownership in China. We also find evidence that house-purchasing decisions are significantly affected by relatives-related variables such as number of immediate relatives in the same city, distance from parents, educational years of family head’s father, and whether parents are alive. Our research helps shed new light on the high homeownership rates in urban China.     

民间资本反哺实业的金融特区构想

在中小企业融资难与民间资本投资无门并存的背景下,引导民间资本反哺实业,为解决民间投资问题、扶持实体经济的发展提供了新思路。本文构想建立金融特区,架构资金融通的桥梁,以引导民间资金投资实体产业;同时,设计多样化的金融手段,打破以往对金融机构营运的限制,以平衡资金供求关系;并实行独特的运行机制,加大对实体产业的经济支持,以提升民间资本服务实体经济的能力,旨在为全国金融改革提供政策建议,从而为国民经济的健康、稳定发展做出贡献。     

Social capital and access to informal finance – evidence from Chinese private firms

This study investigates how firms’ social capital affects their access to informal finance. We argue that social capital helps reduce information asymmetry, increase trust between related parties and enforce lending contracts, so it has positive effects on firms’ access to informal finance. Using novel survey data of Chinese private firms, we find that firms with more social capital have more access to informal finance with lower costs. Further tests show that the effect of social capital is more significant when firms are located in regions with less developed market and lower community’s social capital and during the 2008 financial crisis.     

Conceptualising social risk and business risk associated with private sector development projects

There are various definitions of social risk. For some, social risk pertains to social protection, and risk-taking is thought to enhance human welfare. For others, social risk is contrasted with empirical risk, where the perception of risk by lay members of society differs from that of experts in any given field. More recently, social risk has come to be associated with the potential future negative social impacts of corporate activities and private sector development on individuals and groups. This paper theorises the relationships between social risk and business risk in the context of private sector developments. Many business leaders continue to conflate social risk with their existing understandings of business risk, with social risk understood to be the risk to the business arising from the actions of community stakeholders. Conceiving of social risk in this way has implications for the discrete identification, prevention and mitigation of social and business risks and impacts, and has ramifications for corporate risk management strategies, as well as companies’ relationships with community stakeholders.     

社会资本网络:微小型企业非正规融资的环境基础与动力机制

文章从分析微小型企业的组织经营特征及融资需求的特殊性角度,阐述了非正规融资是各种社会资本聚集的最佳方式,社会资本网络通过非正规融资推动了微型企业融资渠道的贯通.企业的非正规融资行为,不仅是出于资金的需求,而且很大程度上也包含了合作、互助的考虑.