The Relationship between Investment and Asset Life

Optimal investment in an asset and its optimal life are shown to be interrelated through operating cash flows and depreciation allowance, as well as book and salvage values upon termination; thus they are determined simultaneously. Asset life and investment are positively (negatively) related if delaying abandonment increases (reduces) the benefit of marginal investment. If investment and asset life are positively related, increased debt financing or allowable depreciation positively impact on them; otherwise, the impact is ambiguous in sign. Further, investment in a zero salvage value asset and its holding period increase with depreciation or leverage when (1) its cash flows form an annuity or (2) the firm employing it is tax-exempt.     

基于偿付能力的寿险资金战略资产配置

保险资金的战略资产配置是基于公司风险偏好,为满足负债和资本回报要求,对保险资金在大类资产上进行长期规划与分配的过程.本文介绍的寿险资金"战略资产配置三维方法论",是以偿付能力为核心风险偏好,在资本市场长期回报均值回归及Cornish-Fisher展开调整的跨周期宏观经济假设基础上,利用马科维茨模型对公司整体的资产组合进...     

我国寿险公司资产配置研究

本文研究寿险公司的最优资产配置问题。与以往研究不同,本文基于寿险公司收益率分布的实证考察,结合法律法规对寿险资产投资的限制,建立寿险公司资产配置模型。首先建立保险公司的收益模型,以及投资比例和在险价值模型。为了完成对目标函数的刻画,利用水晶球软件对风险资产收益率序列进行分布匹配测试,分析收益率序列分布假设;最后,利用MATLAB优化软件包计算中国人寿的最优资产比例,并与其实际配置进行了比较分析。     

Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation

Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.     

Prolonged Reserves Accumulation,Credit Booms,Asset Prices and Monetary Policy in Asia

This article examines past evidence of prolonged periods of foreign exchange reserves accumulation in the Asia-Pacific region. Several proxies for this unobserved variable are considered, including a newly proposed one based on a factor model. We focus on identifying periods of prolonged interventions and identify its key macro-financial determinants. Two broad conclusions emerge from the stylized facts and the econometric evidence. First, the best protection against costly reserves accumulation is a more flexible exchange rate. Second, the necessity to accumulate reserves as a bulwark against goods price inflation is misplaced. Instead, there is a strong link between asset price movements and the likelihood of accumulating foreign exchange reserves that are costly. Policy implications are also drawn.     

Life Insurers’ Decision to Use Retained Asset Accounts for Life Insurance Payouts: A Case Study

This case study allows students in a variety of insurance courses to analyze the use of retained asset accounts for insurance policy payouts to beneficiaries that, when reported by Bloomberg Magazine in a series of articles published in 2010, led to litigation and the enactment of statutory and regulatory reforms in some states. In analyzing this multifaceted case, students can be assigned to examine insurance laws and regulations, insurance operations, decision making under uncertainty, ethics, reputation, and/or customer relations.     

对我国寿险公司建立资产波动准备金的设想

随着我国寿险资金投资渠道的逐步放开,对寿险投资资产的风险控制难度日益加大.目前监管部门对投资风险的控制在一定程度上降低了投资风险,但仍有不断增加的趋势.针对寿险公司现有的资产类型及未来的资产类型,可以设想建立资产估值准备金和利率维持准备金,以期增强我国寿险公司的财务稳定性和偿付能力.     

偿二代与资产负债匹配约束下寿险公司最优资产配置

保险公司资产配置需要同时考虑资产负债匹配和风险-收益均衡.本文在偿二代对保险资产负债匹配的隐性要求和保险资产负债管理监管规则对资产负债匹配的显性要求下,考察了资本占用和久期匹配约束下的险资投资策略,研究了保险公司的最优资产配置问题.结果 显示:负债久期较长的寿险公司很难同时满足偿二代资本要求和资产负债久期匹配要求;保险...     

Alexander Hamilton Church: His Family and Early Life

The contribution of Alexander Hamilton Church (1866–1936) to accounting and management science is well known. Yet his biographers (Urwick and Wolf, 1984; Vangermeersch, 1988) found that his family and early life were enigmas. This paper opens the curtains drawn by Church and reveals details of his notable ancestry and his early life, including his first six months in the United States and Canada.     

资产结构的喜与忧

梳理A股上市公司流动资产占总资产比率居高位的至少有四种情况：一是包括银行、保险及券商等在内的金融企业,二是具有“类金融”特点的房地产公司,三是传统行业中的“轻资产”型公司,四是刚刚成功运作IPO的上市公司。不同的资产结构,管理层面临不同的经营问题,比如严格资金流转与审批制度、     

Asset volatility

We examine whether fundamental measures of volatility are incremental to market-based measures of volatility in (i) predicting bankruptcies (out of sample), (ii) explaining cross-sectional variation in credit spreads, and (iii) explaining future credit excess returns. Our fundamental measures of volatility include (i) historical volatility in profitability, margins, turnover, operating income growth, and sales growth; (ii) dispersion in analyst forecasts of future earnings; and (iii) quantile regression forecasts of the interquartile range of the distribution of profitability. We find robust evidence that these fundamental measures of volatility improve out-of-sample forecasts of bankruptcy and help explain cross-sectional variation in credit spreads. This suggests that an analysis of credit risk can be enhanced with a detailed analysis of fundamental information. As a test case of the benefit of volatility forecasting, we document an improved ability to forecast future credit excess returns, particularly when using fundamental measures of volatility.     

我国农村小额人身保险制度问题研究

日前,由保监会组织和启动的农村小额人身保险试点在19个省(自治区)铺展开来,小额人身保险在面临良好发展机遇的同时,在实践中也存在诸多制约其发展的问题和因素.本文针对我国农村开展小额人身保险的现实环境,借鉴其在国外运行的成功经验,从政府作为小额保险制度初级供给主体的制度供给效率、小额保险经营机构的产品供给能力以及小额保险目标群体的需求意愿与购买能力三个维度出发,研究农村小额人身保险制度的可持续性发展问题,希望对刚刚起步的我国农村小额人身保险的可持续运行和政策制定提供决策参考和对策建议.     

Diagnosing Asset Pricing Models Using the Distribution of Asset Returns

This paper develops a set of diagnostic tests which can shed light on why a particular model is failing and indicate what steps might be taken to make the model consistent with asset returns. Theoretical bounds on the moments of a stochastic discount factor are derived as a function of the moments of observed asset returns. Particular attention is paid to restrictions on moments other than the variance. These bounds can also be used to measure the information about the distribution of the discount factor contained in the moments of various asset returns. As an application of this methodology, bounds on the discount factor are estimated using size-based portfolios, and the results are used to analyze the small firm effect. Empirical results indicate, for the period 1926–1975, that moments of the returns of small firms contain information about the discount factor that is not contained in the moments of the returns of large firms and/or a proxy of the aggregate wealth portfolio. However, this difference disappears when more recent data is included.     

Complex Asset Markets

Investors' individual arbitrage models introduce idiosyncratic risk into complex asset strategies, driving up average returns and Sharpe ratios. However, despite the attractive risk-return trade-off, participation is limited. This is because effective Sharpe ratios in complex asset markets vary with investors' expertise. Investors with higher expertise, better models, and lower resulting idiosyncratic risk exposures realize higher Sharpe ratios. Their demand deters entry by less sophisticated investors. As predicted by our model, market dislocations are characterized by an increase in idiosyncratic risk, investor exit, and persistently elevated alphas and Sharpe ratios. The selection effect from higher expertise agents' more favorable Sharpe ratios is unique to our model and key to our main results.     

Renegade Asset Markets

Local markets with tight land use controls result in prices rising relative to wages and affordability. Affordability is eased by unconventional but risky finance. Tight land use and loose financing in these renegade markets concentrates the impact of national or international shocks. A positive demand shock raises prices in these tight markets. If ongoing price momentum is expected, households switch to ownership and landlords reduce the rental stock. House prices, rents and occupancy rise and fall together in these markets. A five-equation sequential structure in land use, financial contracts, house prices, rents and vacancy for 17 United States cities confirms geographical concentration. Coastal California and South Florida are fundamentally risky markets. Discount rates there are three percentage points higher than the sample median. Two percentage points are attributable to land use and the other to unconventional finance. National and international financial crises are highly concentrated regionally.     

银行资产证券化问题研究

资产证券化是国际商业银行业务发展的重要内容之一，在我国尚未开展相关业务，为尽快与国际接轨，有必要对此进行认真研究。     

Asset pricing dynamics

This paper is concerned with the issue of dynamics in financial data and asset pricing models such as the CAPM. A literature review in this area is undertaken and highlights the need for a modern time series econometric approach in asset pricing. Such an approach is discussed and deals with problems related to structural breaks and microstructures, dynamics in the mean and variance process, and non-stationary regressions and cointegration. An empirical application using UK stock market data demonstrates the merit of the proposed methodology in correcting market model regressions.     

Rational Asset Prices

The mean, covariability, and predictability of the return of different classes of financial assets challenge the rational economic model for an explanation. The unconditional mean aggregate equity premium is almost seven percent per year and remains high after adjusting downwards the sample mean premium by introducing prior beliefs about the stationarity of the price–dividend ratio and the (non)forecastability of the long–term dividend growth and price–dividend ratio. Recognition that idiosyncratic income shocks are uninsurable and concentrated in recessions contributes toward an explanation. Also borrowing constraints over the investors' life cycle that shift the stock market risk to the saving middle–aged consumers contribute toward an explanation.