Nanyang Business School Forum on Risk Management and Insurance

Risk-Revealing Contracts for Government-Sponsored Microinsurance in China

Tags: Health insurance, microinsurance, government monopoly, adverse selection, risk-revealing contract
More from: , Frank Yulin Feng, Michael. R. Powers, Joseph Qiu

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Frank Yulin Feng, Assistant Professor, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics; Bingzheng Chen, Professor, Tsinghua University; Michael. R. Powers, Professor, Tsinghua University; Joseph Qiu, Head of Catastrophe Modeling – JLT Re Americas

In January of 2016, China’s State Council announced the merger of the nation’s two major health insurance programs for low-income residents – the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), which serves rural citizens, and the Urban Residents’ Basic Medical Insurance system (URBMI), which serves city dwellers – into the newly created Urban and Rural Residents’ Basic Medical Insurance (URRBMI) system. Like its two predecessor organizations, the URRBMI is a microinsurance facility organized by China’s central and provincial governments (see Wang et al., 2014, and Zhu et al., 2017).

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Efficiency and Profitability in the Global Insurance Industry

Tags: Cost efficiency, Data envelopment analysis, Frontier efficiency, Industry dependency, Industry idiosyncrasy
More from: Martin Eling, Ruo Jia

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Ruo Jia, Assitant Professor, Department of Risk Management and Insurance, School of Economics, Peking University. Martin Eling, Professor, School of Finance, University of St. Gallen

The measurement of firm performance is central to the business research. Previous studies have demonstrated that emphasis on purely financial measures (e.g. return on equity) may overlook a firm’s competitive advantage embedded in its efficiency in transforming resources (Chen, Delmas, and Lieberman, 2015). Frontier efficiency measures reveal this productive dimension and thus constitute an important element of overall firm performance. With the two measures of different focuses, an important question is to what extent a firm’s efficiency in converting inputs to outputs translates into its financial profit. In other words, what is the link between what firms do (efficiency) and what their shareholders get (profitability)? The intention of this paper is to analyze the alignment and differences between the frontier efficiency and financial profitability measures.

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Catastrophic Risk and Institutional Investors: Evidence from Institutional Trading around 9/11

Tags: Catastrophic Risk, Market Crisis and Stability, Institutional Investor, Trading
More from: Yangyang Chen, Gang Hu, Danlei Bonnie Yu, Jingran Zhao

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Jingran Zhao, Assistant Professor, School of Accounting and Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Gang Hu, Associate professor; Danlei Bonnie Yu, Research Associate; Jingran Zhao, Assistant Professor, all at School of Accounting and Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Over the last several decades, institutional investors (e.g., mutual funds and pension funds) have come to dominate global financial markets. Collectively, institutional investors are the majority shareholders of most publicly-traded companies. As a result, institutional investors have been playing an increasingly significant role in almost all aspects of financial markets. An interesting question that naturally arises is: what role do institutional investors play during financial market crises caused by catastrophic events? Are they sophisticated investors who provide a “steady hand” in stabilizing financial markets, or do they “panic” like many retail investors and thereby exacerbate such crises? This is an important research question with relevant practical and policy implications.

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Endogenous Risk-Exposure and Systemic Instability

Tags: systemic risks, financial networks, capital regulation, shadow banks
More from: Biao Guo, Songtao Wang

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Chong Shu, The USC Marshall School of Business

Is financial system’s interconnectedness a leading factor for the 2008 global financial crisis? This question has sparked a wide range of interest from academics to policymakers. On one hand, a highly connected financial system has been argued to be robust to financial crises due to its co-insurance for each individual bank (Allen and Gale, 2000; Freixas et al., 2000). On the other hand, recent papers argued that the relationship between the banking system’s interconnectedness and the financial stability is not monotonic because the interlinkages also pose a propagation risk (Gai et al., 2011; Acemoglu et al., 2015).

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Macro Factors in Corporate Bond Credit and Liquidity Spreads

Tags: Affine Models, Credit Default Swaps, Macroeconomic Variables, Credit Risk, Liquidity, More from: Biao Guo, Songtao Wang

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Biao Guo, Associate Professor, School of Finance, Renmin University of China; Songtao Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Finance, Shanghai Jiaotong University.

It is widely known that credit risk alone cannot explain corporate yield spreads. For instance, Collin-Dufresne, Goldstein, and Martin (2001) and Huang and Huang (2012) show that credit risk only accounts for a small fraction of the observed yield spreads on investment-grade bonds and a larger fraction for speculative-grade bonds. A large number of papers have been dedicated to studying this issue and find that the nondefault component of yield spreads is mainly related to the illiquidity of corporate bonds (see, e.g., Longstaff, Mithal, and Neis (2005), Chen, Lesmond, and Wei (2007), Martell (2008)).

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Market Risk Disclosure and Crash Risk: Evidence from Textual Analysis

Tags: Disclosure, Market Risk, Crash Risk, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, More from: Shingo Goto, Xin Luo, Zhao Wang

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Zhao Wang, University of Rhode Island. Shingo Goto, Associate Professor of Finance, University of Rhode Island; Xin Luo, Assistant Professor of Accounting, Marquette University.

Investors, financial analysts, regulators, and other market participants generally agree on the necessity of improving the quality of disclosures that firms make to the public about their exposures to market risk, including interest rate risk, foreign currency exchange rate risk, commodity price risk, equity price risk, and so on. Enhancing the quality of market risk disclosures should help investors improve the process of security valuation and analysis (CFA Institute 2016) and reduce investors’ panics and sensitive trading behaviors in response to unfavorable changes in market conditions (e.g., Rajgopal 1999; Linsmeier et al. 2002; Thornton and Welker 2004).

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The Time Variation in Risk Appetite and Uncertainty

Tags: Risk Appetite, Economic Uncertainty, Asset Pricing, Non-Gaussianity, Predictability, High Frequency Risk Aversion Index
More from: Geert Bekaert, Eric Engstrom, Nancy Xu

Editor’s Note: Presented at the 2018 China International Risk Forum. Posted by Nancy R. Xu, Assistant Professor of Finance, Carroll School of Management, Boston College; Geert Bekaert, Professor of Business, Finance Division, Columbia Business School; Eric C. Engstrom, Adviser, Research and Statistics Division, Federal Reserve Board.

It have become increasingly commonplace to assume that risk aversion or investor mood evolves over time. In recent years, the VIX, typically referred to as the “fear index”, reached around 45 during the peak of the European Debt Crisis with fears of government defaults, remained low during the year of 2017 perhaps indicating investor complacency, and experienced a sharp jump likely associated with fears for higher future interest rates during early February 2018. The literature has agreed that changes in risk aversion are important determinant of asset price dynamics. However, the literature hasn’t reached an agreement on a reliable measure of market-wide or aggregate risk aversion. The main contribution of our paper is to develop a measure of time-varying risk aversion that is extracted from a wide information set of asset prices and macro data while simultaneously satisfying the asset pricing theory. This risk aversion index disentangles from macroeconomic uncertainty and can be obtained at high frequency, which constitutes its two clear advantages.

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Old and New Thinking about the Role of Stocks in Defined Benefit Pension Plans

Tags: pension, defined benefit, investment, portfolio, CIRF
More from: Deborah Lucas

Editor’s Note: Deborah Lucas, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

A short summary of the 2018 China International Risk Forum Keynote Speech “Old and New Thinking about the Role of Stocks in Defined Benefit Pension Plans” by Professor Deborah Lucas, MIT

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