Risk management and reinsurance strategies in the Spanish insurance market (1880–1940)

Reinsurance allows insurance companies to diversify their risks. However, from this original role, insurance companies have developed various reinsurance strategies in order to expand their market share. From the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1940s, Spanish insurance companies used reinsurance in a largely unregulated context. This article analyses the reinsurance practices and their adaptation to the singularities of the Spanish market, namely: the difficulties for the consolidation of a core of pure reinsurers; the management of reinsurance in the internationalisation process; and the use of reinsurance by mutual societies to overcome their lack of equity capital.     

Measuring Stakeholder Integration: Knowledge,Interaction and Adaptational Behavior Dimensions

Stakeholder Theory combines the pursuance of business goals and responsibility toward a firm’s stakeholders. Despite the wealth of research on Stakeholder Orientation, we still have much to learn about specific measurements for several related constructs. In this study, we draw on two samples of 129 and 151 Spanish firms, respectively, to investigate CEOs’ perceptions on Stakeholder Integration (SI), leading to the identification of three dimensions of the construct. In this respect, our study suggests that Knowledge of Stakeholders, Interactions between a firm and its stakeholders, and the adaptation of a firm’s behavior to stakeholders’ demands constitute the main dimensions of SI. This construct has the potential to connect the stakeholder and strategy literatures.     

Do economic statistics contain information to predict stock indexes futures prices and returns? Evidence from Asian equity futures markets

This research examines the impact of local and international market factors on the pricing of stock indexes futures in East Asian countries. The purpose of this paper is to present a study of the significant factors that determine the major stock indexes futures’ prices of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. This study first investigates the relationships between Hang Seng Index Futures, KLCI Futures, SiMSCI Futures, KOSPI Futures, Taiwan Exchange Index Futures and local interest rates, dividend yields, local exchange rates, overnight S&P500 index and a newly constructed index, Asian Tigers Malaysia Index (ATMI). 11 years historical data of stock indexes futures and the economic statistics are studied; 10 years in-sample data are used for testing and developing the pricing models, and 1 year out-of-sample data is used for the purpose of verifying the predicted values of the stock indexes futures. Using simple linear regressions, local interest rates, dividend yields, exchange rates, overnight S&P500 and ATMI are found to have significant impact on these futures contracts. In this research, the next period close is predicted using simple linear regression and non-linear artificial neural network (ANN). An examination of the prediction results using nonlinear autoregressive ANN with exogenous inputs (NARX) shows significant abnormal returns above the passive threshold buy and hold market returns and also above the profits of simple linear regression (SLR). The empirical evidence of this research suggests that economic statistics contain information which can be extracted using a hybrid SLR and NARX trading model to predict futures prices with some degree of confidence for a year forward. This justifies further research and development of pricing models using fundamentally significant economic determinants to predict futures prices.

     

Entering new country and product markets: does export promotion help?

Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact of trade promotion activities on export outcomes using trade support and highly disaggregated export data for the entire population of exporters of Uruguay, a small developing country, over the period 2000–2007 to estimate a binary outcome model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that trade supporting activities have helped firms reach new destination countries and introduce new differentiated products.