Stock Options and the Corporate Demand for Insurance

This article shows that a corporate manager compensated in stock options makes corporate decisions to maximize stock option value. Overinvestment is a consequence if risk increases with investment. Facing the choice of hedging corporate risk with forward contracts on a stock market index fund and insuring pure risks the manager will choose the latter. Hedging with forwards reduces weight in both tails of corporate payoff distribution and thus reduces option value. Insuring pure risks reduces the weight in the left tail where the options are out‐of‐the‐money and increases the weight in the right tail where the options are in‐the‐money; the effect is an increase in the option value. Insurance reduces the overinvestment problem but no level of insurance coverage can reduce investment to that which maximizes the shareholder value.     

Exclusions and the Demand for Property Insurance

The paper examines property insurance contracts in which consumers choose the upper limit on coverage. Exclusions are of two types, and both reduce the demand for insurance of the included perils. A practical implication is that an insurer can raise the demand for fire insurance by offering an earthquake rider, and profit from the rider even when the premia are ceded in such a way that the rider does not raise profit directly. The results do not require assumptions about correlations between included and excluded losses, which is interesting because correlations are decisive in most of the other literature on background risk.     

On the Corporate Demand for Insurance: The Case of Korean Nonfinancial Firms

Several theories have been developed to explain the motives for corporate insurance purchases, but there are few empirical tests of these theories. Furthermore, the empirical results are not consistent across studies, suggesting the need for further research. This study uses accounting data for 433 publicly listed nonfinancial firms in Korea to test the determinants of insurance demand for the period 1990 through 2001. Our results support the theory that firm size, tax considerations, and firm ownership are important determinants of insurance demand. Firms that are members of chaebols demand more insurance than unaffiliated firms, all else equal. Contrary to theory, our results also indicate that firms that have higher debt‐to‐equity ratios demand less insurance than less leveraged firms, and that firms that have greater liquidity demand more insurance. This might be related to the overall high debt levels of firms in the period leading up to the Korean financial crisis in 1997, but that investigation is beyond the scope of this study.     

On the Corporate Demand for Insurance: Evidence From the Global Reinsurance Market

In this article, we view the demand for reinsurance as a “special case” of the corporate demand for insurance. We analyze the extent to which reinsurance purchases by the global property–liability insurance industry vary across countries and assess the relative importance of country‐level factors compared with firm‐level factors. Using a data set consisting of 21,814 firm‐year observations from 33 (developed and developing) countries during the period 2000–2012, we find that after controlling for firm‐level factors, country‐level factors have economically as well as statistically significant effects on the demand for reinsurance.     

The Demand for Life Insurance Policy Loans

Previous research has examined the demand for life insurance policy loans using aggregate policy loan data. In contrast, we use a detailed household survey data set containing life insurance and policy loan information to alternatively, and in some cases more directly, examine the four hypotheses traditionally associated with policy loan demand. Our research provides the first U.S. evidence (in the post–World War II period) in support of the policy loan emergency fund hypothesis. In particular, we find that the more detailed emergency fund proxies used here reveal a significantly positive relation between loan demand and recent expense or income shocks.     

Strategic Demand for Insurance

We focus on the corporate demand for insurance under duopoly. We consider the case in which firms purchase insurance in order to enhance their competitiveness. We show that a higher level of corporate insurance makes a firm more aggressive and its competitor less aggressive in the output market (strategic effect). The optimal coverage of insurance is determined by comparing the strategic effect of insurance and the cost of insurance. The optimal coverage is positive if the strategic effect is greater than the cost of insurance. An interesting implication is that a risk‐neutral firm may purchase actuarially unfair insurance. The main strategic effect of insurance comes from the fact that firms purchase insurance before they produce outputs. Insurance makes firms more aggressive due to the limited risk costs of firms.     

Portfolio Insurance with Liquidity Risk

This paper studies a portfolio insurance problem with liquidity risk. We consider an investor who wants to maximize the expected growth rate of wealth in a low liquid market. The investor can trade assets only at random times and his wealth must not fall below a predetermined floor. We find the optimal expected growth rate and an optimal strategy. The optimal strategy is closely related with a traditional constant proportion portfolio insurance strategy. Also we show that the same strategy maximizes the growth rate almost surely. Further we study the floor effect on the growth rate.     

The Dynamics of Liquidity in Commercial Property Markets: Revisiting Supply and Demand Indexes in Real Estate

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - A common definition of liquidity in real estate investment is the ability to sell property assets quickly at full value, as reflected by...     

The Demand for Life Insurance in OECD Countries

This article examines the determinants of life insurance consumption in OECD countries. Consistent with previous results, we find a significant positive income elasticity of life insurance demand. Demand also increases with the number of dependents and level of education, and decreases with life expectancy and social security expenditure. The country's level of financial development and its insurance market's degree of competition appear to stimulate life insurance sales, whereas high inflation and real interest rates tend to decrease consumption. Overall, life insurance demand is better explained when the product market and socioeconomic factors are jointly considered. In addition, the use of GMM estimates helps reconcile our findings with previous puzzling results based on inconsistent OLS estimates given heteroscedasticity problems in the data.     

Stimulating the Demand for Insurance

This article acts as a review and also a guide to policymakers who are interested in understanding the determinants of insurance demand and how it affects general economic development. By providing a synopsis and evaluation of existing empirical research on the development of insurance markets, this article provides a discussion of the factors that promote insurance market development. This article then highlights certain issues that both insurance companies and policymakers can utilize further in their own markets to design future policies that can be geared to promote insurance market development.     

Corporate Yield Spreads and Bond Liquidity

We find that liquidity is priced in corporate yield spreads. Using a battery of liquidity measures covering over 4,000 corporate bonds and spanning both investment grade and speculative categories, we find that more illiquid bonds earn higher yield spreads, and an improvement in liquidity causes a significant reduction in yield spreads. These results hold after controlling for common bond‐specific, firm‐specific, and macroeconomic variables, and are robust to issuers' fixed effect and potential endogeneity bias. Our findings justify the concern in the default risk literature that neither the level nor the dynamic of yield spreads can be fully explained by default risk determinants.     

Corporate Management of Highly Dynamic Risks: Evidence from the Demand for Terrorism Insurance in Germany

This paper investigates a corporation's risk management response to highly dynamic risks. Using a unique data set on the German terrorist insurance market, the paper tests whether corporate risk managers have a clear understanding of the probability distribution of highly dynamic risks or if risk managers learn from severe losses and base their decisions upon day-to-day experience. The paper further investigates whether risk managers become more confident in their risk management decisions over time. For this purpose, we apply Viscusi's prospective reference theory to a corporate context. We find that firms learn from single events when making their risk management decisions, and that risk managers become more confident with their risk management decisions over time.     

The Impact of Regret on the Demand for Insurance

We examine optimal insurance purchase decisions of individuals that exhibit behavior consistent with Regret Theory. Our model incorporates a utility function that assigns a disutility to outcomes that are ex post suboptimal, and predicts that individuals with regret‐theoretical preferences adjust away from the extremes of full insurance and no insurance coverage. This prediction holds for both coinsurance and deductible contracts, and can explain the frequently observed preferences for low deductibles in markets for personal insurance.     

The Price Elasticity of Demand for Whole Life Insurance

In this study a real price index is created for whole life insurance sold in the United States from 1953 to 1979. New purchases of whole life insurance are shown to be negatively related to changes in this cost index, contrary to what has been widely accepted in the insurance literature, but consistent with economic theory. The existence of strong price elasticity of demand for whole life insurance does not ensure, however, that the insurance industry manifests a high degree of price competition.     

农业巨灾保险的需求意愿及其影响因素

本文基于六省市的调查数据,对农民的农业巨灾保险需求意愿进行了特征性描述。并采用Logistic回归模型分别对有无政府补贴情况下,农民对农业巨灾保险的需求意愿及其影响因素进行分析,同时还对农民购买农业巨灾保险意愿的稳定性及其影响因素进行检验。结果表明,政府补贴能有效释放农业巨灾保险的潜在需求。是否参加过农业专业或合作组织、农民文化程度、家庭总收入、农业巨灾风险发生频率以及家庭拥有土地规模等因素显著影响农民对农业巨灾保险需求意愿的稳定性,并能促成农民购买农业巨灾保险行为的发生。     

流动性导流——中国货币需求及现阶段流动性过剩问题研究

近年来,流动性过剩成为了我国宏观经济的要害性问题.所谓"流动性导流",就是将目前过剩的流动性通过若干可能的渠道疏导到实体经济之外,使之基本不对实体经济产生负面影响.我国流动性过剩是由外向型经济结构引起的外汇过多流人造成的,在经济结构短期内难以根本改变且人民币升值预期难以根本逆转的情况下,只能从疏导过多流动性的角度来寻找防治通胀之道.具体的疏导渠道包括将一部分流动性导向境外和在境内扩大虚拟经济以吸收一部分流动性.后者是解决当前通胀压力和股市扩容压力的一箭双雕之策,也是本文的新观点所在.     

On the Demand for Portfolio Insurance

While insurers manage underwriting risk with various methods including reinsurance, insurers increasingly manage asset risk with options, futures, and other derivatives. Previous research shows that buyers of portfolio insurance pay considerably for downside protection. We add to this literature by providing the first evidence on the cost of portfolio insurance, the payoff to portfolio insurance, and the relative demand for portfolio insurance across VIX levels. We find that the demand for portfolio insurance is relatively high at low levels of VIX, suggesting purchasers demand more downside protection when this protection is cheap on an absolute basis (but expensive on a relative basis). We also provide the first evidence on the hedging behavior of specific investor classes and show that the demand for portfolio insurance is driven by retail investors (individuals) who buy costly insurance from institutional investors. Results are consistent with other types of paradoxical insurance‐buying behavior.     

Corporate Risks and Property Insurance: Evidence From the People's Republic of China

Using panel data (1997–1999) for 235 publicly listed companies in the People's Republic of China, this study empirically tests the linkage between corporate risks and the decision to purchase property insurance and its financial extent. To achieve these objectives, we first estimate a probit insurance participation decision model and then a fixed‐effects insurance volume decision model with Heckman's sample selection correction. Our results indicate that the managerial decision to purchase property insurance is positively related to company size and insolvency risks. By contrast, the amount of property insurance purchased is positively related to systematic risks but negatively related to insolvency and unsystematic risks and company size. We find that the amount of property insurance used by Chinese companies can also be affected by other factors (e.g., the cash flow constraints). In addition, the decision to purchase property insurance and the financial extent to which it is used varies among Chinese companies according to their geographical location. However, state ownership does not appear to be an important determinant of the purchase of property insurance by Chinese publicly listed companies.