Search

In the absence of strong incentive schemes, public service delivery crucially depends on bureaucrat selection. Despite being widely adopted by governments to screen candidates, it is unclear whether civil service examinations can predict job performance. This paper investigates this question by focusing on a highly prestigious and influential set of bureaucrats in Brazil: state judges. We first explore data on judges' monthly output and cross-court movement to separately identify what share of observed performance is explained by judges and courts. We estimate that judges account for at least 23% of the observed variation in the number of cases disposed. Using a novel data set on examinations, we then show that, within cohorts of candidates taking the same exam, those with higher grades perform better than their lower-ranked peers. Our results suggest that competitive examinations can be an effective way to screen candidates, even among highly qualified contenders.

This paper proposes new holding horizon (HH) measures of active management, and examines the relation between horizon and manager skill. Our HH measures identify, in the cross-section, funds with better long-term alphas, while reported turnover identifies, in the time-series, when a particular fund is likely to exhibit a higher alpha in the short run. This superior long-term performance of long HH funds is due to their superior skills in picking stocks with higher future cash-flow growth. Moreover, stocks largely held by long-horizon funds outperform stocks largely held by short-horizon funds by 2.4%-3.8% per year, adjusted for risk, over the following five-year period.

Between March and August 2020, S&P and Moody’s downgraded approximately 25$\%$ of collateral feeding into CLOs and only 2$\%$ of tranche values, with rating actions concentrating in junior tranches. Both S&P and Moody’s modeling indicate that the impacts should have been considerably larger, especially for higher-rated tranches. Neither changes in correlation nor the accumulation of pre-COVID-19 protective cushions can explain the downgrade asymmetry on upper tranches. Instead, CLO managers repositioned their collateral pools to dampen the negative credit shock and rating agencies incorporated qualitative adjustments in their CLO ratings. Important potential policy and market implications from these findings are discussed. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Variable annuities, the largest liability of U.S. life insurers, are investment products containing long-dated minimum return guarantees. I show that guarantees with similar economic risks are treated differently by regulation and these differences impact insurers’ hedging behavior. When the regulatory regime recognizes certain risks, insurers start to hedge these risks in a substantial way. For some guarantees, this involves hedging both interest rate and equity market risks. However, for others, it involves hedging only equity market risk. As the regulatory regime still does not recognize the interest rate risk of all guarantees, insurers remain exposed to substantial interest rate risk. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We analyze insurance demand experiments conducted in two different settings: in-person at a university laboratory and online using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdworking platform ("MTurk"). Subject demographics differ significantly across the samples, but average insurance demand is similar. However, MTurk subjects have more variation in their demand and react less to changes in exogenous factors of the insurance situation. Applying filters to the MTurk population does not lead to more comparable demand between both samples. Additionally, while MTurk subjects pass comprehension questions at the same rate as in-person subjects, they show more random behavior in other questions. Based on our experiment, we outline the advantages and disadvantages of each platform, suggest some best practices for conducting insurance demand experiments using MTurk, and draw implications for future studies using this subject population.

Exploiting detailed disclosures mandated by Accounting Standard Codification (ASC) 820, we provide evidence for the return relevance of Level 3 fair value remeasurements for a comprehensive sample of U.S. listed banks. We find that Level 3 remeasurements recognized in earnings are more return relevant than those recognized in other comprehensive income (OCI). Our results suggest that Level 3 remeasurements in OCI partially reflect transitory illiquidity discounts that are less relevant when banks have the ability to hold the underlying assets. The regulatory capital treatment of OCI also affects the return relevance of Level 3 remeasurements in OCI. Importantly, we find no differences in the return relevance of realized versus unrealized Level 3 remeasurements in earnings, allaying concerns that investors perceive unrealized Level 3 remeasurements of lesser quality. Overall, our findings support the usefulness of the segregated disclosures of Level 3 fair value remeasurements. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

We use detailed assessments of CEO personalities to explore the nature of CEO overconfidence as it is commonly measured. Longholder, the option-based measure of CEO overconfidence introduced by Malmendier and Tate (2005a) and widely used in the behavioral corporate finance and economics literatures, is significantly related to several specific characteristics that are associated with overconfident individuals as well as individuals with lower ability. Similar relations hold for overconfidence measures based on CEOs’ earnings guidance. Investment-cash flow sensitivities are larger for both Longholder and less able CEOs. After controlling for ability and other characteristics, Longholder CEOs’ investments remain significantly more sensitive to cash flows. These results suggest that overconfidence, as measured by Longholder, is correlated with lower ability but still reflects empirically distinct aspects of overconfidence.

This study examines how taxpayer level of goal congruence (the extent to which a taxpayer’s interests align with the interests of the tax collecting agency) can improve tax compliance. While there is ample evidence on the deterrent effect of audit probability on taxpayer noncompliance, there is no evidence related to the potential role that goal congruence may have on compliance behavior. Results of our study indicate that goal congruence influences taxpayer compliance decisions, in that those with higher goal congruence (i.e., greater support for how tax dollars are spent) report higher amounts of taxable income. In addition, we find that audit probability only influences taxpayer compliance decisions when there is support for the government’s use of tax dollars. When taxpayers do not support government programs, their compliance is lower regardless of the audit probability. This highlights the importance of gaining taxpayer support for government programs, and that attempts to align the goals of taxpayers with those of the government may increase voluntary compliance among taxpayers. We also examine the role that Machiavellianism, a measure of moral obligation, plays in taxpayers’ compliance decisions. We find that for certain individuals who are motivated more by self-interest (those with high Machiavellianism), a high audit rate as well as support for a program may be necessary to improve compliance behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

In Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases in the United States, firms are either reorganized, acquired, or liquidated. I show that decisions to liquidate often reduce creditor recovery, costing creditors billions of dollars every year. I exploit the within-district random assignment of bankruptcy judges to estimate a structural model of bankruptcy. I estimate that liquidation is frequently chosen when a reorganization would have maximized total creditor recovery. Liquidations involving “363 sales,” in which managers sell assets without creditor approval, are especially harmful for creditors. I estimate that courts could dramatically improve creditor recovery by assigning liquidations using a statistical model.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) represents a large increase in background risk for individuals. Like the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme events (e.g. financial downturns, natural disasters, and war) have been shown to change attitudes towards risk. Using a risk apportionment approach, we examine whether risk aversion as well as higher order risk attitudes (HORAs) (prudence and temperance) have changed during COVID-19. This methodology allows us to measure model-free HORAs. We include prudence and temperance as higher order measures, as these two have been largely understudied under extreme events but are determinants of decisions related to the health and financial domains. Once we account for socio-demographic characteristics, we find an overall increase in risk aversion during COVID-19. We also find similar results using a hypothetical survey question which measures willingness to take risks. We do not find changes in prudence and temperance using the risk apportionment methodology.

We examine whether public financial statement information is incrementally useful in forecasting confidential taxable income. More precise firm-level taxable income forecasts can improve policymakers' modeling of the tax system and the analysis of proposed changes in corporate tax law, while more accurate macro-level forecasts of corporate taxable income can improve estimates of corporate tax revenues, a significant component of the federal budget. We find the addition of financial statement information improves firm- and industry-level estimates of future taxable income by primarily providing more timely information, but also through accruals. Our results suggest that macroeconomic forecasts of taxable income may be further improved by the aggregation of firm-level forecasts that are generated using financial statement information. Importantly, our results are driven primarily by tax information in financial statements. We also contribute to the research on the information content of financial statement information for forecasting economic activity. JEL Classifications: M41; M48; H25.

This study examines the moderator effect of directors' and officers’ liability insurance (D&O insurance) on the relationship between ownership structure and overinvestment. We find that firms with D&O insurance and higher insurance coverage have a higher probability of overinvestment. These results show the D&O insurance is like a moral hazard effect. We also find evidence that the relationship between ownership structure and overinvestment is affected by D&O insurance. As well as the results support that the firms purchasing D&O insurance is moderator effect on ownership structure and overinvestment.

We carry out a quantitative analysis of the financing measures proposed for the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) regarding the target level of the fund and the contribution scheme of member entities. We estimate the loss distribution of the EDIS considering different sources of systemic risk associated with the correlations between bank assets inside and outside the eurozone countries, and we analyse the sensitivity of the results to bank portfolio risk. We determine the variations in the cost of insurance due to the relative risk profile of banks in the Banking Union and the loss-absorbing capacity of the contribution made by countries with the methodologies proposed by the European Banking Authority (2015). Our findings show how the interconnection between banks of different countries has an important influence on accumulated losses in the tail of the distribution, although the correlation within a country exerts a stronger effect. Both aspects must be considered in the calibration of the target level of the fund to avoid underestimating financing needs. Likewise, deterioration in the quality of bank portfolios produces a significant reduction in the fund's loss-absorbing capacity, which calls into question its soundness in times of economic recession. Finally, we assess the impact of the new contribution scheme on moral hazard and the possibility of cross-border subsidies between the countries of the Banking Union. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

How do people record information about the outcomes they observe in their environment? Building on a well-established neuroscientific framework, we propose a model in which people are hampered in their perception of outcomes that they expect to seldom encounter. We provide experimental evidence for such “outlier blindness” and discuss how it provides a microfoundation for neglected tail risk by investors in financial markets.

This paper deals with the optimal reinsurance problem and involves the goals of both insurer and reinsurer. An important novelty may be the incorporation of the background risk that the reinsurer uses in order to diversify (or hedge) the risk ceded by the insurer. Accordingly, general methods to prevent the reinsurer moral hazard must be extended, and a new constraint must be satisfied by the selected reinsurance contract, namely, "the reinsurer increment of risk must be lower than the contract premium". Simultaneously, since the contract must be attractive to the insurer too, "the contract premium must be lower than the insurer risk reduction". Integrating both ideas, "the contract premium must be higher than the reinsurer risk growth and lower than the insurer risk mitigation". Bearing in mind both requirements, that is, the protection against the moral hazard and the spread containing the contract premium, the optimal reinsurance problem is studied under very general conditions about the involved risk measures and premium principles, general solutions are provided, and a practical illustrative example is presented.

The success of behavioral economics has led to a new challenge: many biases offer observationally similar predictions for a targeted financial anomaly. To tame this bias zoo, we combine subjective survey responses with observational data to propose a new approach, one that is robust to question-specific biases introduced through surveys. We illustrate this approach by administering a nationwide survey of Chinese retail investors to elicit their trading motives. In cross-sectional regressions of respondents’ actual turnover on survey-based trading motives, perceived information advantage and gambling preference dominate other motives, though they are not the most prevalent biases based on survey responses.

Physicians, judges, teachers, and agents in many other settings differ systematically in the decisions they make when faced with similar cases. Standard approaches to interpreting and exploiting such differences assume they arise solely from variation in preferences. We develop an alternative framework that allows variation in preferences and diagnostic skill and show that both dimensions may be partially identified in standard settings under quasi-random assignment. We apply this framework to study pneumonia diagnoses by radiologists. Diagnosis rates vary widely among radiologists, and descriptive evidence suggests that a large component of this variation is due to differences in diagnostic skill. Our estimated model suggests that radiologists view failing to diagnose a patient with pneumonia as more costly than incorrectly diagnosing one without, and that this leads less skilled radiologists to optimally choose lower diagnostic thresholds. Variation in skill can explain 39% of the variation in diagnostic decisions, and policies that improve skill perform better than uniform decision guidelines. Failing to account for skill variation can lead to highly misleading results in research designs that use agent assignments as instruments.

How does the value of life affect annuity demand? To address this question, we construct a portfolio choice problem with three key features: i) agents have access to life-contingent assets, ii) they always prefer living to dying, iii) agents have non-expected utility preferences. We show that as utility from being alive increases, annuity demand decreases (increases) if agents are more (less) averse to risk rather than to intertemporal fluctuations. Put differently, if people prefer early resolution of uncertainty, they are less interested in annuities when the value of life is high. Our findings have two important implications. First, we get better understanding of the well-known annuity puzzle. Second, we argue that the observed low annuity demand provides evidence that people prefer early rather than late resolution of uncertainty.

In this paper, we investigate an optimal insurance design problem in which the insured's risk preference is of the regret-theoretical expected utility type and admissible insurance contracts are set to satisfy both the principle of indemnity and the incentive-compatible condition. When the insurance premium is calculated by the expected value principle, we show that the optimal solution for a regret-averse insured can be in the form of no insurance or partial insurance above a deductible. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimality of no insurance and provide a numerical algorithm to derive the optimal partial insurance above a deductible. Notably, the deductible disappears if and only if the insurance premium is actuarially fair. Finally, we carry out a comparative statics analysis to examine the effect of the insured's regret coefficient on the insured's final wealth and insurance demand. When the insurance pricing is actuarially fair, we find that the increase of the regret coefficient incentivizes the insured to purchase less insurance coverage and leads to an increase in risk of the insured's final wealth. However, our numerical analysis indicates that this finding is not always true for unfair insurance pricing.

This research uses over 750,000 loan records from LendingClub issued from 2015 through 2018 to estimate the gross rates of return (ROR) for each loan by assuming the borrowers stop paying their loans once a default occurs. We find the probability of earning a positive return is 75.6% in terms of the total number of loans. By our calculation, the median of ROR ranges from 4.7% to 10.3% by lending to grade A through D borrowers, but ROR plummets to −6.6% to grade E-and-below borrowers. Regression analysis shows that borrowers' credit rating, loan interest rate, loan status, and paid-month are the most critical factors to influence investors’ ROR. Lastly, we offer a few investment implications and suggestions regarding participation in LendingClub.

This study examines whether sell-side equity analysts engage in “social learning” where their earnings forecasts are influenced by the forecasts and outcomes of other analysts associated with other firms (i.e., the “peers”) in their respective portfolios. We find that analyst optimism is negatively correlated with the recent forecast errors among peers on other firms in the analyst portfolio. An analyst is also more likely to issue “bold” forecasts when similar forecasts were recently issued for other portfolio firms. Analysts learn more from their peers with similar personal characteristics. Overall, social learning is beneficial to analysts and improves their forecast accuracy.

Much of the research in law and finance reduces long, complex texts down to a small number of variables. Examples include the coding of corporate charters as an entrenchment index or characterizing dense securities complaints by using variables that capture the amount at issue, the statutes alleged to have been violated, and the presence of an SEC investigation. Legal scholars have often voiced concerns that this type of dimensionality reduction loses much of the nuance and detail that is embedded in legal text. This paper assesses this worry by applying text analysis and machine learning to a corpus of more than five thousand complaints filed in private securities class actions that collectively contain over 90 million words. This analysis demonstrates the richness of the information embedded in these complaints by answering three related questions. First, does the text provide indications of the eventual outcomes in the cases? Second, do text-based variables out perform non-text variables in predicting outcomes? And, finally, does text analysis outperform market participants when used as a basis for picking securities? The evidence suggests that the answer to all three of these questions is yes and these findings have several implications. First, the results suggest that there is meaningful information embedded in text and, relatedly, that excessive reduction of dimensions may produce omitted variable bias. Second, evidence of abnormal returns is consistent with the understanding that it takes time for market participants to absorb complex information. Finally, the ability to predict first-filed complaints more readily than consolidated complaints suggests that the goal of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act to reduce the race to the courthouse and improve the quality of initial complaints has not been fully realized.

A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high-quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with. When the measure of informed buyers is low, there exists a unique and stable equilibrium, and interestingly, price, trading volume and welfare typically decrease with more informed buyers. When the measure of informed buyers is intermediate, multiple equilibria arise, and price, trading volume and welfare may decrease or increase with more informed buyers depending on the equilibrium being played. A switch from one equilibrium to another can lead to large drops in liquidity, price, trading volume and welfare, like a financial crisis. The measure of informed buyers is then endogenized by allowing buyers to invest in a technology that enables them to identify high-quality assets. In this case, the model features endogenous strategic complementarity in acquiring the information technology. Multiple equilibria still exist, with different measures of informed buyers, but a scheme of tax/subsidy on information acquisition sometimes leads to the unique equilibrium.

Draft lottery data combined with Danish longitudinal administrative records show that military service can reduce criminal activity for youth offenders who enter service at ages 19-22. For this group property crime is reduced for up to five years from the beginning of service, and the effect is therefore not only a result of incapacitation while enrolled. We find no effect of service on violent crimes. We also find no effect of military service on educational attainment and unemployment, but we find negative effects of service on earnings. These results suggest that military service does not upgrade productive human capital directly, but rather impacts criminal activity through other channels, for example by changing the attitudes to criminal activity for this group.

A risk-based premium scheme could be a reliable system to determine a fairer deposit insurance premium. This research aimed to assess Indonesian banks’ risk profile, including per size classification and ownership as well as to counterfactually simulate a risk-based deposit insurance system for the individual banks. This research combined analysis of variance (ANOVA) and non-parametric approach applied to 75 banks (2008q1-2019q3). The results showed that big banks did not necessarily posture better risk management compared to small banks. Also, under the risk-based scheme, banks with better risk management could be rewarded, while less prudent banks could be punished.

In this study, we consider how changing expectations of earnings affect a dishonest manager’s strategy to overstate earnings and an auditor’s strategy to exert effort in a two-period setting. We model the manager type as either honest or dishonest, which allows us to differentiate audit risk from audit effort. Researchers typically assume audit effort and audit risk are negatively associated, which we find for changes in our period 2 payoff parameters, but we find the association can be positive, specifically with changes in our period 1 game parameters. Further, by dichotomizing, we show that the directional change in market price does not necessarily follow the directional change in audit effort as the prior literature suggests, because market price also adjusts for expected bias through changes in the intercept. A key finding is that when period 1 expected earnings increase, the probability that the manager is dishonest decreases, which allows the auditor to reduce audit effort. This finding suggests that observations of earnings that just meet or beat an earnings target and suspected of being managed may not be indicative of an audit failure, but indicative of an efficient allocation of effort. Finally, our multiperiod setting demonstrates that the effects from a change in the manager’s or auditor’s incentives in period 1 may reverse in period 2. Studies typically examine the contemporaneous effects of these changes on market price and/or audit risk, but fail to identify the cross-temporal effects we document in our study.

When workers are not aware of a mandated benefit, they cannot take it into account in their employment decision, leading to deadweight loss. On the other hand, lack of awareness of a benefit reduces moral hazard, decreasing deadweight loss. I incorporate these trade-offs into a model of mandated benefits and apply the model to Temporary Disability Insurance, an employment benefit mandated in five states. First, I provide evidence on low awareness of this benefit using data collected through an original survey. Then I use the updated mandated benefits model to show that over a broad range of reasonable assumptions, the additional employee valuation of the benefit outweighs the additional program cost from moral hazard, and thus a public information campaign would increase employment.

An important societal problem is that people underinsure against risks that are unlikely or occur in the far future, such as natural disasters and long-term care needs. One explanation is that uncertainty about the risk of non-reimbursement induces ambiguity averse and risk prudent decision makers to take out less insurance. We set up an insurance experiment to test this explanation. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, we find that the demand for insurance is lower when the nonperformance risk is ambiguous than when it is known and when decision makers are risk prudent. We cannot attribute the lower take-up of insurance to our measure of ambiguity aversion, probably because ambiguity attitudes are richer than aversion alone.Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11166-021-09364-7.

This paper studies how professional asset allocators such as endowments, fund-of-funds, or pension funds select fund managers for investments. We develop a simple model of their due-diligence process to motivate predictions about the timing of investment decisions. We then test these predictions using a unique dataset with detailed information on the interactions between a large institutional investor and 1,093 hedge funds over the course of 8 years. Soft information conveyed during the meetings with fund managers strongly influences the decisions. A one standard deviation increase in our proxy for positive soft information doubles the probability of fund selection and reduces the due-diligence time by 20%. Contrary to prior research, we find no evidence that relying on these subjective judgements is wasteful. Instead, in a matched sample, conditioned on the fund characteristics and past performance, the 12-month average peer-adjusted returns are 1.5% higher for the selected funds.

Using proprietary data from a major fund data provider, we analyze the screening activity of investment consultants (ICs). We find that ICs frequently shortlist funds using threshold screens clustered at $500MM for AUM, 0% for benchmark-adjusted return, and quartiles for return percentile rank screens. Funds just above the $500MM AUM threshold get 14%–18% more page views and 5–9 pp greater flows over the next year compared to similar funds just below the threshold. Our results are consistent with ICs using a two-stage consider-then-choose decision-making process and cognitive reference numbers in selecting screening thresholds. (JEL G41, G11, G14, G29) Received January 8, 2021; editorial decision September 3, 2021. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

This paper proposes three robust estimators (M-estimation, S-estimation, and MM-estimation) for handling the problem of outlier values in seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) models. The SURE model is one of regression multivariate cases, which have especially assumption, i.e., correlation between errors on the multivariate linear models; by considering multiple regression equations that are linked by contemporaneously correlated disturbances. Moreover, the effects of outliers may permeate through the system of equations; the primary aim of SURE which is to achieve efficiency in estimation, but this is questionable. The goal of robust regression is to develop methods that are resistant to the possibility that one or several unknown outliers may occur anywhere in the data. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of robust estimations with the traditional non-robust (ordinary least squares and Zellner) estimations based on a real dataset of the Egyptian insurance market during the financial year from 1999 to 2018. In our study, we selected the three most important insurance companies in Egypt operating in the same field of insurance activity (personal and property insurance). The effect of some important indicators (exogenous variables) issued by insurance corporations on the net profit has been studied. The results showed that robust estimators greatly improved the efficiency of the SURE estimation, and the best robust estimation is MM-estimation. Moreover, the selected exogenous variables in our study have a significant effect on the net profit in the Egyptian insurance market.

Many companies regularly disclose non-GAAP performance measures to communicate firm-specific information that does not fit within the mold of GAAP reporting. However, these non-GAAP measures may have low information content or even be misleading to investors. Thus, the question arises of whether auditors should play a larger role in the reporting of non-GAAP measures, which currently are not audited. We run an experiment to provide ex ante evidence on the effect of auditing non-GAAP measures. Specifically, we present investor-participants with a non-GAAP measure that should be used when making investment judgments (more informative) or should not be used when making investment judgments (less informative) and is either audited or is not audited. As predicted, we find that, when participants view a non-GAAP measure that is more informative, they appropriately use the non-GAAP measure in their investment-related judgments, regardless of whether the measure is audited. However, also as predicted, we find that, while participants appropriately do not use a less informative non-GAAP measure when it is not audited, participants inappropriately do use the less informative non-GAAP measure in their investment-related judgments when it is audited. Mediation results provide evidence consistent with audits affecting investors’ reliance on non-GAAP measures. Specifically, our results are consistent with audits of non-GAAP measures signaling more than is intended, evidenced by investors perceiving an audited non-GAAP measure as being useful in their investment decisions when the measure is less informative to them. Our findings suggest that regulators should exercise caution when it comes to prescribing assurance over non-GAAP measures.

The issuance of central bank digital currencies became a real policy issue after the announcement of Facebook’s Libra. Which types of product attributes should central bank digital currencies have to be widely accepted? We answer this question by analyzing consumers’ acceptance of hypothetical payment methods. We used Japanese data from the 2019 Financial Literacy Survey to estimate a model of consumers’ ranking of the frequency of the use of five payment methods via three statistical models. The estimates of three models showed that the respondents to the survey value payment methods with shorter transaction times and mobile payment methods. Based on the estimates of these models, we conducted counterfactual simulations for the introduction of the hypothetical mobile version of noncash payment methods that required a shorter transaction time. We found that these hypothetical products would be the most frequently used payment methods on average; however, respondents with experience of financial troubles and with small financial asset holdings would use them less frequently. The results suggest that if the Bank of Japan wanted to issue a central bank digital currency that would be used almost every day as a replacement for cash, policy tools should be utilized to encourage the use of it by these groups as well.

Inspired by the double-debt problem in Japan where the mortgagor has to pay the remaining loan even if their house was destroyed by a catastrophic event, we model the lender's cash flow, by an expo...

This article examines factor investing in the presence of an environment, social, and governance (ESG) screening overlay. The authors find that virtually no degradation in performance or turnover costs occur when using a negative-based ESG screen (i.e., removing only companies that have an actively bad ESG score). However, there are severe risk-induced performance issues and high transactions costs involved when the screening process becomes more active and includes only companies that are ESG-forward. The authors find that this is true for individually constructed factor portfolios, a composite benchmark of factor portfolios, and a stock selection model constructed from factor scores. Interestingly, they find that both screening methodologies produce significant improvement in ESG portfolio scores. They find very modest increases in turnover with the ESG screening of bad companies and significant costs with the more aggressive ESG screening techniques. In general, the authors conclude that ESG screening of negative companies is a positive way forward for agents who wish to add ESG to their factor-based investment portfolios and that the method of implementing ESG makes a large difference in outcomes. Key Findings ▪ ESG screens that exclude poor companies have superior performance to screens that include good companies. ▪ ESG screens that exclude poor companies incur only a slightly higher turnover than unscreened portfolios. ▪ ESG Screened portfolios that use exclusion screening perform better than unscreened portfolios, but they also are more growthy.

There is a significant potential demand around the world for a flexible product to manage individual longevity risk. However, annuity markets remain thin, driven by factors including lack of pricin...

Insurers are increasingly embracing the InsurTech ecosystem. The most important InsurTech-related trend in automobile insurance is usage-based insurance (UBI), which enables insurers to access and ...

Ex post moral hazard arises when the insured has an unobservable influence on the size of a loss after its occurrence. In automobile (property) insurance, ex post moral hazard could increase in the scope of the repairs and/or the value of the repairs. Both vehicle owners and auto repairers could gain from increasing the scope of repairs, while auto repairers would gain from an increase in the value of repairs. An analysis of 994 Australian road traffic crashes found that ex post moral hazard increased the value of repairs by 46.8 per cent of which 9 percentage points was explained by an increase in the scope of the repairs, which was defined as an increased from 2 to 2.4 parts per auto repair.

Informal care provided by adult children substitutes for formal long-term care services. However, information about children is not used in pricing long-term care insurance which pays only for formal care. I start by providing descriptive evidence that private information about children’s informal care likelihood results in adverse selection: the market attracts a disproportionate number of individuals who face higher formal care utilization risk due to a lower probability of receiving care from their children. To quantify the welfare consequence of adverse selection, I develop and estimate a dynamic intergenerational model featuring long-term care insurance, savings, informal care provision, and employment choices. Based on the estimated equilibrium insurance market framework, I show that using information about children in pricing insurance contracts reduces adverse selection and results in the average welfare gain of $6,200 per family. Using the non-cooperative feature of the model, I also quantify to what extent parents forgo long-term care insurance to avoid diminishing children’s informal care incentive.

In this paper, we analyze a decision-making problem for an insurer with limited liability, who is subject to a solvency constraint and wants to maximize the expected value through reinsurance purchase and external financing. We impose mild conditions on the reinsurance premium principle, which are the axioms of law invariance, risk loading and preserving the convex order. These three axioms are satisfied by all the widely used premium principles, except the Esscher principle, listed in Young (2004) . If value at risk (VaR) or conditional value at risk (CVaR) is adopted to calculate the insurer's regulatory capital, we show that the optimal reinsurance can be in the form of two layers. The optimal reinsurance form is reduced to one layer once the premium principle further satisfies a weak condition. In particular, under Wang's, expected value, variance and Dutch premium principles, we derive the insurer's optimal strategies of reinsurance and financing, which are obtained explicitly under the VaR risk measure but have to be solved numerically for the CVaR risk measure. Results indicate that the insurer has three types of optimal strategies: the reinsurance only strategy, external financing only strategy, and mixed strategy. Moreover, the insurer's attitude toward ceding the risk through reinsurance and increasing capital through external financing is often greatly affected by the regulatory regime, the financing cost and the reinsurance price.

We use field experiments in the employee giving program at Google to demonstrate that hassle costs inhibit charitable donations. Relative to the control condition involving donation by credit card on the charity's website, the treatment group received a simpler option to donate via payroll deduction, thereby decreasing the ‘hassle cost’ of giving by a couple of minutes. In each of two experiments, we found that reducing hassle costs increased the probability of donation to a promoted charity by at least 50%, without reducing average gift size. Results from the two experiments lead us to conclude that the convenience of payroll deduction reduces hassle costs and produces increas in workplace giving for promoted charities. Google later rolled out the program more widely, and suggestive evidence shows that while payroll deduction was popular and increased frequency of donations, it did not increase overall workplace charitable giving.

We provide a characterization of comparative weak risk aversion and comparative RDEU risk aversion for RDEU preferences and, in particular, we correct a claim made by Quiggin (1993) regarding comparative RDEU risk aversion. We then apply the analysis of comparative risk aversion to a problem of optimal design of underwriting contracts in securities issuance. Specifically, in public offerings of equity, an investment banking firm (the underwriter) plays an insurance role: through the underwriting contract, the issuing firm transfers the issue risk to the underwriter, as would an insured to an insurer. We extend a classical model proposed by Mandelker and Raviv (1977) to situations where the issuing firm and the underwriter have RDEU preferences. Assuming that the issuing company’s and the underwriter’s utility functions are concave and linear, respectively, and that either the underwriter is risk neutral or both the issuing company and underwriter are strongly risk averse, we show that a firm-commitment contract is optimal if and only if the issuing company’s probability weighting function dominates the underwriter’s.

We perform a laboratory test of Pledge-and-Review bargaining, implementing a simplified version of the model analysed in Harstad (2021a) . In theory, this institution should increase contributions to a public good only if there is uncertainty over the value of possible future payoffs. In contrast, we find that Pledge-and-Review increases efficiency in all the settings we investigate, and that the improvement is most persistent in our setting without uncertainty. Our results suggest that the Pledge-and-Review institution may be useful, even without uncertainty, as it allows conditional cooperators to test, risk free, the cooperativeness of their partners.

Participating (or with-profit) life insurance contracts play an important role in private old-age provision in many countries. Life insurers pool the assets and liabilities of a heterogeneous portfolio of such contracts and typically perform some return smoothing in the collective investment. Participating contracts were historically equipped with a cliquet-style (year-to-year) guarantee. The current low interest rate environment and regulatory requirements have forced life insurers to develop new product designs with lower and/or different types of guarantees. However, observed demand as well as the findings of several studies show that (year-to-year) guarantees are (subjectively) highly attractive for long-term investors. In this paper, we show that return smoothing alone (that is, without guarantees) can significantly increase the attractiveness for such investors. Most importantly, we show that many (loss averse) long-term investors will even prefer products without guarantee but with smoothed returns over other products with guarantee features. The results hold for long-term investors who not only consider the terminal value but at least partially also evaluate potential annual changes in the account value (even if such changes only have a rather low impact on the decision). Additionally, we show that the descriptive model used in this paper is able to explain the popularity of traditional participating life insurance products in Germany providing further evidence that long-term investors consider potential annual value chances already when making the investment decision.

The pension insurance schemes existence leads to moral hazard: the insured defined benefit pension plans tend to invest more heavily in risky assets. A possible countermeasure mentioned in the literature, but not yet analyzed, is the introduction of a restriction on the pension plans’ portfolio policy. The US context is chosen for analysis. We argue that a portfolio restriction is needed in the case of a sponsoring firm in financial difficulty having an underfunded pension plan. We prove that the restriction should respond to the objective of liability hedging. Estimation results suggest that the corresponding portfolio strategy is a low-risk policy. The paper recommends that the maximum equity proportion is fixed at 30%.