Interest Rate Risk of Life Insurers: Evidence from Accounting Data

Determinants of Voluntary Accounting Policy Choices by Australian Life Insurers

This paper empirically examines various incentives facing managers of Australian life insurers to voluntarily use actuarial-based income smoothing techniques (AIS). AIS were subsequently incorporated into jointly-developed Australian and New Zealand life insurance accounting standards (LIAS) issued in 1997. The propensity of managers to voluntarily use AIS is predicted to be related to the firm...

Money Demand near Zero Interest Rate: Evidence from Regional Data

The author thanks especially Eric Bennet Rasmusen, Richard Anton Braun, Fumio Hayashi, Shin-ichi Fukuda, seminar participants at Tsukuba University, Keio University, the University of Tokyo, and the Far Eastern Meeting of the Econometric Society 2001 for their helpful comments. Toyoichiro Shirota provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed in this paper are solely the author’s o...

Hedge Commitments and Agency Costs of Debt: Evidence from Interest Rate Protection Covenants and Accounting Conservatism

Participating Policy Usage Evidence from Stock Life Insurers

Extant literature demonstrates that participating policies mitigate shareholder-policyholder incentive conflicts in stock insurance firms. However, extending the argument in Mayers and Smith (1994), the authors formally show that participating policies also exacerbate the shareholder-manager incentive conflicts in stock insurance firms. In this article, the authors test whether hypotheses deriv...

Insurers' response to selection risk: Evidence from Medicare enrollment reforms.

Evidence on insurers' behavior in environments with both risk selection and market power is largely missing. We fill this gap by providing one of the first empirical accounts of how insurers adjust plan features when faced with potential changes in selection. Our strategy exploits a 2012 reform allowing Medicare enrollees to switch to 5-star contracts at anytime. This policy increased enrollmen...