Search results for "Insurance"
showing 10 items of 194 documents
Warren Buffett versus Zvi Bodie: Should You Buy Or Sell Put Options?
2021
Academics and investment professionals often disagree when it comes to investment advice. Legendary investor Warren Buffett is a proponent of time diversification and firmly believes that stocks are less risky in the long run. Therefore, he often sells long-term put options instead of buying them for portfolio protection. By contrast, the famous finance professor Zvi Bodie argues that time diversification is a fallacy and, therefore, his advice to fund managers is to buy long-term portfolio insurance. In this article, we consider the optimal portfolio choice problem for a loss-averse investor. First, we demonstrate that our loss-averse investor subscribes to the principle of time diversific…
Robust Conditional Independence maps of single-voxel Magnetic Resonance Spectra to elucidate associations between brain tumours and metabolites.
2020
The aim of the paper is two-fold. First, we show that structure finding with the PC algorithm can be inherently unstable and requires further operational constraints in order to consistently obtain models that are faithful to the data. We propose a methodology to stabilise the structure finding process, minimising both false positive and false negative error rates. This is demonstrated with synthetic data. Second, to apply the proposed structure finding methodology to a data set comprising single-voxel Magnetic Resonance Spectra of normal brain and three classes of brain tumours, to elucidate the associations between brain tumour types and a range of observed metabolites that are known to b…
Asset and Liability Management for Insurance Products with Minimum Guarantees: The UK Case
2006
Abstract Modern insurance products are becoming increasingly complex, offering various guarantees, surrender options and bonus provisions. A case in point are the with-profits insurance policies offered by UK insurers. While these policies have been offered in some form for centuries, in recent years their structure and management have become substantially more involved. The products are particularly complicated due to the wide discretion they afford insurers in determining the bonuses policyholders receive. In this paper, we study the problem of an insurance firm attempting to structure the portfolio underlying its with-profits fund. The resulting optimization problem, a non-linear program…
Insurance Distribution Carried Out by Insurers in Spain
2020
AbstractIn this chapter I analyze the impact that Directive 2016/97 has on insurance companies. The new requirements for employees who distribute the insurance policies of the insurance company increase the protection for customers. In addition, these new requirements lead to a reform of the governance system of the insurance company. New policies, new procedure manuals are necessary to carry out the distribution of insurance by the insurance company. Therefore, I will study the new legal requirements and their impact on the Spanish regulations.
Enhancing Bank Transparency: A Re-assessment
2001
Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the disciplinary effect of transparency regulation. Second, achieving transparency is costly for banks, as it dilutes their charter values, and hence it also reduces their private costs of risk-taking. We consider both the direct costs of complying with disclosure requirements and the indirect transparency costs stemming from imperfect property rights governing information and specify the conditions under which…
Financing Unemployment Benefits: Dismissal versus Employment Taxes
2006
This paper investigates the effects of using dismissal taxes to finance unemployment benefits. We compare dismissal and employment taxes in a model with search frictions. Employment taxes give rise to externalities because firms do not take into account the effects their dismissal decisions have on others. By introducing dismissal taxes to finance unemployment insurance, these externalities can partly be internalized. Taking into account the budget of the unemployment insurance, employment taxes can be reduced by more than necessary to offset the adverse effect of dismissal taxes on the firm value. The introduction of dismissal taxes leads to higher job creation and lower unemployment, in c…
Direct Compensation and Risk Management: A Key Study from the Insurance Sector
2019
This paper examines the business model of an Italian company (TIS) that manage the claims for non-life insurance companies with innovative solutions. When a policy-holder make a claim for a loss or damage, the insurer may decide either to repair, rebuild or replace the property or to offer a cash settlement. To provide these services, many insurance companies have started developing strategic relationships directly with building firms, repairers, specialist suppliers and project managers, in order to find reliable contractors that will repair or replace the policy holder’s property quickly, with high quality and at a low cost. Opposite to other EU Countries, in Italy many insurance companie…
CO2 Prices and Portfolio Management
2008
Since January 2005, the attention on European carbon markets has been increasing and thus the interest in studying the implications of the existence of two new assets in portfolio management. In this article we analyse both the characteristics of the EUAs Phase I and Phase II as a sole investment and the impact of including these two assets, considered separately, in a well-diversified portfolio. In order to control the problems of using historical returns, we have performed this analysis using as expected returns either historical returns or risk-adjusted returns. We find that, although the weights of EUAs are not too important when incorporating the EUAs in an optimal and well-diversified…
The charter of foreigners merchant ships in the expulsion of the Andalusia Moriscos
2009
El embarque de moriscos a bordo de navíos mercantes de origen extranjero constituye una faceta interesante en el estudio del proceso de expulsión andaluz. Debido a la escasa participación de las escuadras reales y la necesidad de llegar a acuerdos concretos con los que suministrar embarcaciones para el transporte de los moriscos, la Corona y sus representantes se verían obligados a llegar a diferentes compromisos con los cónsules de las naciones de extranjeros, y algunos mercaderes particulares, para garantizar unos traslados que, de otra manera, se hubieran retrasado en exceso complicando toda la operación. De este modo y con el paso de las semanas, acabaría por evidenciarse el peso especí…
What explains ‘generosity’ in the public financing of high-tech drugs? An empirical investigation of 25 OECD countries and 11 controversial drugs
2014
In times of increasing cost pressures, public healthcare systems in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries face the question of whether and to which extent new high-tech drugs are to be financed within their public healthcare systems. Systematic empirical research that explains across-country variation in these decisions is, however, almost non-existent. We analyse an original dataset that contains coverage decisions for 11 controversial drugs in 25 OECD countries using multilevel modelling. Our results indicate that the ‘generosity’ with which controversial new drugs are publicly financed is unrelated to a country’s wealth and general expenditure levels fo…