Impact investing and sustainable market transformations: The role of venture capital funds

Impact investors often know their financial return on investments, but are less certain about their impact. This article frames impact as their contribution to sustainable market transformation. A sustainable market transformation consists of inception, first movers, critical mass, and institutionalization phases. Given the nature of such transformations, the impact is effectuated at different moments and toward various market actors. Based on an exploratory research design with semi-structured expert interviews, this article aims to create an overview of the roles of impact venture capital funds in sustainable market transformations. The results suggest that the view that the capitalization of start-ups is the only impact of impact investors is a misconception. The needs of companies with sustainability value propositions change over time and consequently impact investors perform various roles. For example, exiting an investment while upholding social and environmental objectives communicates to mainstream business that the start-up is ready to create a greater impact. Further, impact investors fulfill external roles that change the perspectives of institutional actors toward sustainable investments. Based on an overview of the different roles that impact investors fill, this article proposes a future research agenda to strengthen our knowledge about the impact return of investments.     

Do insurers use internal capital markets to manage regulatory scrutiny risk?

Empirical evidence suggests that insurance groups allocate capital to members with better performance or growth prospects and use internal capital markets (ICMs) to protect the franchise value of less capitalized members. We propose and test an additional motivation for the use of ICMs—to manage regulatory scrutiny risk. We show that almost 50% of insurers at risk of facing additional regulatory scrutiny due to failing four Insurance Regulatory Information System (IRIS) ratios received sufficient internal capital to avoid enhanced regulation. Moreover, the likelihood and extent of internal capital allocation are related to regulatory scrutiny risk and the amount of capital allocated is typically just enough to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Time series evidence indicates that groups manage regulatory scrutiny risk by allocating capital toward affiliates when their pre-capital contribution IRIS ratio failures exceed three, and away from affiliates when they are no longer at risk of additional regulatory scrutiny.     

On portfolio optimization: Imposing the right constraints

We reassess the recent finding that no established portfolio strategy outperforms the naively diversified portfolio, 1/N, by developing a constrained minimum-variance portfolio strategy on a shrinkage theory based framework. Our results show that our constrained minimum-variance portfolio yields significantly lower out-of-sample variances than many established minimum-variance portfolio strategies. Further, we observe that our portfolio strategy achieves higher Sharpe ratios than 1/N, amounting to an average Sharpe ratio increase of 32.5% across our six empirical datasets. We find that our constrained minimum-variance strategy is the only strategy that achieves the goal of improving the Sharpe ratio of 1/N consistently and significantly. At the same time, our developed portfolio strategy achieves a comparatively low turnover and exhibits no excessive short interest.     

The Market for Directors’ and Officers’ Insurance

Directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance is a commonly used risk management tool for corporations both in the United States and abroad. While prior research has focused on the demand for D&O insurance and its role in corporate governance, there is an absence of literature on the supply side of the D&O market. Using the newly available D&O Insurance Coverage Supplement to insurers’ statutory filings, we develop a more comprehensive understanding of the D&O insurance market and of those firms that write D&O coverage. We develop and estimate a model of the decision to write D&O insurance and the extent of market participation. Our results suggest that there are significant operational and financial differences between firms that supply D&O insurance and those that do not. Several of these differences (specifically, size, diversification, and organizational form) are consistent with the predictions of the managerial discretion hypothesis.     

What Effect Did AIG's Bailout,and the Preceding Events,Have on Its Competitors?

We examine the effect of American International Group's (AIG) bailout, and the events leading up to it, on its insurance industry rivals. The reaction of rivals to AIG‐related events depends on the relative strength of two competing effects. The contagion effect implies that rival returns will decrease following negative events affecting AIG. In contrast, competitive effects will occur if investors expect that rivals will be able to benefit from AIG's downfall. Using three‐factor multivariate regression model event study methodology, we find evidence of both effects around several key dates in AIG's decline.     

Currency crisis and the forward discount bias: Evidence from emerging economies under breaks

This paper investigates the effects of two financial crises (the 1997 Asian currency crisis and the 2000 Turkish financial crisis) on the forward discount bias in 14 emerging-market economies using a robust two-stage procedure. This unique sample of less researched currencies displays: (i) high persistence in forward discount equations; and (ii) varying variance ratios between changes in exchange rates and the forward premium. The findings provide new insights into the forward discount puzzle: financial crises exert considerable power on the forward discount bias and uphold the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis (FRUH) by reverting the negative sign into positive.     

Disaggregating input–output tables in time: the temporal input–output framework

The input–output framework has evolved dramatically since its initial formulation. New analytical techniques and extensions have allowed a more comprehensive assessment of the economy and expanded its applicability. Nonetheless, the core of the framework has remained unchanged: an annually compiled input–output table, which conveys monetary flows between sectors in a region in a particular year. Hence, the technical coefficients derived from it are ‘average’ input compositions, neglecting fluctuations in production capacity, seasonality and temporal shocks within that period. This paper develops a consistent methodology to disaggregate the annual input–output table in its time dimension in order to estimate intra-year input–output matrices with distinct technical structures for a particular year. The main advantages in relation to the annual model are to allow seasonal effects to be studied within the input–output framework, to better understand the process of coefficient change and to offer a more comprehensive dynamic view of production.     

Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap

This paper describes how the distribution of land access rights and the prevailing social fabric have evolved in a Rwandan village in the face of extreme land pressure. The study was conducted to gain a better understanding of the equity impact of land tenure individualization and the rising incidence of market transactions in such a context. The densely populated area studied during 1988-93 was in northwest Rwanda and belongs to the commune of Kanama in Gisenyi prefecture. Acute competition for land in a context characterized by too slow expansion of non-agricultural income opportunities has led to increasingly unequal land distribution and rapid processes of land dispossession through the functioning of the illegal land market and evolution of indigenous tenure arrangements. Also, the many land disputes and the threat of landlessness have led to rising tensions in social relations and even within the core of family life, paving the way for more overt expressions of discontentment and violence. A connection between those conditions and the civil war which erupted in 1994 is established.     

Overt searchers' responses to advertising

The purpose of this study was to compare two groups of prospective buyers of an industrial product on awareness and recall of a particular advertising campaign. The two groups were: (a) overt searchers - operationally defined as those who had made inquiries about the product, and (b) random prospects - randomly selected from local industrial directories. According to the Howard and Sheth model, it is expected that overt searchers would exhibit greater awareness and knowledge of the advertising campaign than would the random prospects. The results indicated, however, that overt searchers scored higher than random prospects only on awareness. Indeed, they seemed to have poorer recall of the content of the advertisements. The authors provide an explanation for this unexpected result.     

Hybrid Choice Models: Progress and Challenges

We discuss the development of predictive choice models that go beyond the random utility model in its narrowest formulation. Such approaches incorporate several elements of cognitive process that have been identified as important to the choice process, including strong dependence on history and context, perception formation, and latent constraints. A flexible and practical hybrid choice model is presented that integrates many types of discrete choice modeling methods, draws on different types of data, and allows for flexible disturbances and explicit modeling of latent psychological explanatory variables, heterogeneity, and latent segmentation. Both progress and challenges related to the development of the hybrid choice model are presented.