Managing policy lapse risk in Sweden’s life insurance market between 1915 and 1947

Abstract

We examine the challenges that Swedish life insurers faced in managing the lapse risk of policies written on the lives of the industrial urban working class between 1915 and 1947. We observe that with the threat of State socialisation of insurance in the 1930s, industrial life insurers modified their business practices to better control policy lapses. Using firm-level data, we also analyse the effect of socio-economic changes, such as rising real wages, interest rate fluctuations and unemployment on life insurance policy lapses. Our results support contemporary tests of the emergency fund and interest rate explanations for the voluntary premature termination of life insurance policies.     

Credit supply,post-acquisition performance and financial constraints

We study the effect of credit supply on the acquisition behaviour of financially constrained (FC) and financially unconstrained (UC) firms. FC firms are likely to conduct acquisitions when credit supply is greater while UC firms can conduct acquisitions whenever a good opportunity arises. We argue that the flexibility unconstrained firms have is valuable. Our empirical results indicate that UC firms outperform FC firms up to 36 months after the acquisition. We also find that increased credit supply increases the probability of conducting mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for FC firms while it has less impact on M&A behaviour of UC firms.     

QFD—linking the customer to the product development process as a part of the TQM concept

LKAB is one of the world's leading sup-pliers of advanced iron ore products. Its most important markets are the blast furnace based steelworks of Europe. As a result of customers' demands for ever-better products, LKAB has begun to apply Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to its product development pro-grammes. QFD, originally developed in Japan, is a technique which utilises a series of matrices to translate customers' requirements into technical specifications that the producer can use. So far the methodology has mainly been used in the manufacturing industry, with very few applications in process industry.
When launching its QFD project, LKAB began by making strenuous efforts to acquire credible and relevant customer data. Experience after one year's work has been encouraging; the QFD technique has proved to be an effective instrument for feeding customers' requirements into the product development process. In addition, it serves as a guide to setting priorities for research projects. The technique promises to become an established tool in the cornpany's Total Quality Management programme.     

The impact of regulatory review time on incremental and radical innovation: evidence from the high-risk medical device market

Journal of Regulatory Economics - We theoretically and empirically study the effect of variation in regulatory review time on firms’ choices between radical and incremental innovations. We...     

Deal with it! The emergence and reversal of an agro-ecological crisis,Southern Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

The European Early Modern period provides examples of stagnating and even declining production and energy consumption per capita, which can be interpreted as indicators of an emerging crisis. With a focus on agriculture sector, some have suggested that the crisis was ‘conditional’ – meaning that a crisis can only be observed in some cases. This article investigates one such case, a village in Southern Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and investigates the mechanisms that mediate population growth to deteriorating living standards and environmental degradation. It provides new insights into the conditions of pre-industrial agriculture, particularly as regards the consequences of intensified demand pressure in ecologically fragile areas, and argues that human societies must be studied in tandem with their natural surroundings.     

The happy versus unhappy service worker in the service encounter:Assessing the impact on customer satisfaction

This paper assesses the impact of the service worker's display of emotions (i.e., one aspect of functional service quality) on customer satisfaction under the conditions of different levels of technical service quality by means of an experimental approach (N=600), in which display of emotions (unhappiness vs. happiness) and technical service quality (poor vs. good) were manipulated. The results indicate that the impact of the service worker's emotional display behavior on customer satisfaction is contingent on the level of technical service quality, in the sense that customer satisfaction is affected only when technical service quality is good rather than poor. Encouraging a positive display (e.g., by a smile policy), which many service firms do, is thus not a panacea for improved customer satisfaction. The moderating effect is explained in terms of service encounter congruency, which influences the mediated process by which emotional displays by service workers come to affect customer satisfaction.     

Germany,the problem of leadership,and institution-building in EMU reform

ABSTRACT

This article examines the extent to which Germany has provided leadership in creating institutions to overcome the euro area crisis. Under which conditions does Germany act as a driver of institutional change, and what are the implications for the Economic and Monetary Union? Germany’s leadership record is mixed: while it took the lead in enhancing austerity, it refrained from fostering burden-sharing. As a result, EMU faces a persistent imbalance between enhanced institutions of supervision and insufficient institutions of financial assistance. Moreover, the article points out that current conditions for the emergence of German leadership in the euro area are unfavourable.     

Do people care about social context? Framing effects in dictator games

Many previous experiments document that behavior in multi-person settings responds to the name of the game and the labeling of strategies. With a few exceptions, these studies cannot tell whether frames affect preferences or beliefs. In three large experiments, we investigate whether social framing effects are also present in Dictator games. Since only one of the subjects makes a decision, the frame can affect behavior merely through preferences. In all the experiments, we find that behavior is insensitive to social framing. We discuss how to reconcile the absence of social framing effects in Dictator games with the presence of social framing effects in Ultimatum games.     

Adoption of enterprise systems and radio frequency identification among service firms

A promising technology for optimizing supply-chain processes is radio frequency identification (RFID). By adding functionality to previous enterprise systems, the aim is to increase transparency of information throughout the supply chain. In this paper, we present a survey of RFID implementation in Swedish service firms. The findings show that although the great majority of firms are actively working with integrated information systems, only a very small fraction have adopted RFID.