The practice of collective bargaining in the private sector in Quebec (Canada): the changing ‘rules of the game’

Drawing on 45 semi‐structured interviews with union negotiators active in the Quebec private sector, this article shows that local bargaining practices, despite their plurality, have tended to change following major trends. It also reveals, more fundamentally, a redefinition of the ‘rules of the game’. The transformation and stability of these social rules, which are much more focused on the needs of employers, have tended to weaken collective bargaining as a tool for industrial democracy.     

The geography of trade in goods and asset holdings

Gravity models have been widely used to describe bilateral trade in goods. Portes and Rey [Portes, R., Rey, H., 2005. The Determinants of Cross-Border Equity Flows. Journal of International Economics, 65(2), 269-296.] applied this framework to cross-border equity flows and found that distance, which proxies information asymmetries, is a surprisingly very large barrier to cross-border asset trade. We adopt a different point of view and explore the complementarity between bilateral trade in goods and bilateral asset holdings in a simultaneous gravity equations framework. Providing different instruments for both endogenous variables, we show that a 10% increase in bilateral trade raises bilateral asset holdings by 6% to 7%. The reverse causality is also significant, albeit smaller. Controlling for trade, the impact of distance on asset holdings is drastically reduced.     

Trust‐Preferred Securities and Insurer Financing Decisions

We analyze insurance holding company (IHC) issuance of trust‐preferred securities (TPS) from 1994 to 2013. We find that larger and more financially levered IHCs issued TPS in 1996 and 1997, as well as those that obtained financial strength ratings from A.M. Best. Abnormal stock price returns are positively related to financial distress costs, growth opportunities, and tax burden, but negatively related to size. Consistent with the pecking order theory, intent to use TPS proceeds to retire debt is positively related to abnormal stock returns, whereas intent to use proceeds to retire preferred equity is negatively related to abnormal stock returns.     

The Role of Holding Company Financial Information in the Insurer-Rating Process: Evidence From the Property-Liability Industry

We examine data for the year ended December 31, 1997 for 80 publicly traded property‐liability insurers that have Best financial strength ratings of their consolidated insurance‐operating subsidiaries. These firms employ a holding company structure, in which a parent owns the stock of multiple insurance‐operating subsidiaries. The operating subsidiaries prepare a consolidated annual report using the Statutory Accounting Principles (SAP), and an analogous set of financial statements based on the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is released by the parent. We find that the financial characteristics important in determining ratings at the individual firm level—capitalization, liquidity, profitability, and size—are also important at the group level. Further, financial ratios from holding company statements are incrementally useful in the ratings' process, after group‐level ratios have been taken into account. Robustness tests based on a subsample of holding companies with minimal investment outside of the property‐liability industry reinforce our conclusion that parent company statements influence consolidated group ratings. However, our data do not allow us to separate the relative contribution of the GAAP model and underlying transactions to the ratings decision.     

The Journal of Risk and Insurance: Authors of Influence

The purpose of our study is to identify the most influential authors who published in the Journal of Risk and Insurance (JRI) between 1989 and 2010 using citations as our primary indicator of author influence. Extant citation studies concerning the JRI are at the journal level rather than the author level or they examine citations appearing in JRI articles rather than citations to JRI articles. Our study examines articles published in the JRI from 1989 to 2010 and the citations to these articles from 1989 to 2014 reported in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WOS). This approach is consistent with the method used by WOS to calculate journal impact factors. Our study presents a variety of author productivity measures based on JRI publication activity and citations to JRI articles. The top 50 authors are ranked and identified for each metric.