The Fragility of Market Risk Insurance KOIJEN, RALPH S.J.; YOGO, MOTOHIRO
The Journal of finance (New York),
April 2022, Letnik:
77, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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ABSTRACT
Variable annuities, which package mutual funds with minimum return guarantees over long horizons, accounted for $1.5 trillion or 35% of U.S. life insurer liabilities in 2015. Sales decreased ...and fees increased during the global financial crisis, and insurers made guarantees less generous or stopped offering guarantees to reduce risk exposure. These effects persist in the low‐interest rate environment after the global financial crisis, and variable annuity insurers suffered large equity drawdowns during the COVID‐19 crisis. We develop and estimate a model of insurance markets in which financial frictions and market power determine pricing, contract characteristics, and the degree of market completeness.
We re‐examined the impact of rising imports from China on intra‐firm productivity growth in the European Union during the period 2005–16. In contrast to previous studies, we found that an increasing ...share of Chinese imports in total imports has slowed productivity growth over the observation period. This unfolded especially after the 2008/09 financial crisis and was more pronounced for firms with lower productivity growth. On average, the net effect of China's increasing import intensity on productivity growth has been negative for firms in the European Union since 2010. At the beginning of the sample, firms growing at the median rate experienced a modest growth‐enhancing effect of 0.02 percentage points, which turned slightly negative at −0.06 percentage points in the last observation year. The effect was muted for high‐growth multinational firms, which experienced a productivity growth premium from Chinese import competition at higher growth rates. Compared with the United States, the negative impact of Chinese import competition on the performance of EU firms is visible with a time lag.
Abstract
We show that search frictions in credit markets affect accepted interest rates and loan sizes and distort consumption. Using data on car loan applications and originations not intermediated ...by car dealers, we isolate quasi-exogenous variation in both the costs and benefits to searching for credit. After identifying lender-specific policies that price risk discontinuously, we study the differential response to offered interest rates by borrowers who face high and low search costs. High-search-cost borrowers are 10$\%$ more likely to accept loan offers with higher markups, consequently originating smaller loans and purchasing older and less expensive cars than lower-search-cost borrowers.
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.
Herbicide use is increasing in sub-Saharan Africa. While herbicides promise improved weed-control, labour savings and even reduced land degradation - they are promoted to enable Conservation ...Agriculture (CA) adoption - there are concerns about their health and environmental risks. Yet, their socio-economic implications have been largely ignored. We investigated the effects of herbicide use on casual labour relations (ganyu) in Central Malawi using a survey of 275 households. In rural Malawi doing ganyu is the main coping strategy during the hunger season/growing season. We find that where CA promotion incentivised herbicide use, herbicides became common and substituted much in-season ganyu hiring. Consequently, many households were unable to find work and ended up hungry. While herbicides mainly benefited the better-off who could afford them, these benefits occurred at the expense of the poor and food insecure. Agricultural development initiatives should be aware that herbicides are likely to reduce agricultural labour opportunities and rural wages. Where alternative labour opportunities are limited, this may contribute to social differentiation, hunger and the individualisation of poverty. Our study demonstrates the potential hazards of neglecting the social equity implications of technology promotion - a lesson pertinent to the sustainable intensification agenda, including the promotion of CA.
This article analyses the impact of household head's involuntary job loss on young person's (15–24 years old) likelihood to transition from non‐employment to employment. We construct twelve two‐year ...pseudo‐panels based on previous year's labour market outcomes using Turkish Household Labor Force Surveys (THLFS) from 2005 to 2016 and then pool the twelve pseudo‐panels for analysis. We examine youth's labour market responses according to education levels and gender. We show that a female with at least a high school degree is about 8.7 percentage points more likely to transition to from non‐employment to employment in the group where the head experienced an unexpected job loss than a female in the group where the head remained employed. Furthermore, for females, the probability of transitioning to employment increases by education level. For males, although we find positive and statistically significant effect of head's job loss on the transition probability, we do not find any differences according to education level.
In this paper, we examine the impact of air pollution on the job location choice of a highly educated labor force. Using the administrative job contract records of all graduates from Tsinghua ...University from 2005 to 2016, we find that air pollution significantly reduces the probability of elite graduates accepting job offers in a polluted city. Specifically, all else equal, if a city’s PM
2.5
level increases by 10 μg/m
3
, the share of Tsinghua graduates choosing that city will decrease by 0.23 percentage point (9% of the mean value). This “crowding-out” effect is larger for master’s and doctoral graduates, but insignificant for undergraduates. A placebo test finds this effect does not exist for individuals who had signed a job contract prior to university admission, which strengthens our finding. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that males, students who grew up in cleaner provinces, and students graduating from school of the environment are more sensitive to air pollution. Different levels of preference for clean air and tolerance to pollution, as well as whether having the knowledge of pollution’s harms, can effectively explain the heterogeneous effect of air pollution’s impacts on job location choices of those elites.
Terror in France Kepel, Gilles; Jardin, Antoine
2017, 2017., 20170424, 2017-05-22, Letnik:
64
eBook
The virulent new brand of Islamic extremism threatening the West
In November 2015, ISIS terrorists massacred scores of people in Paris with coordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, cafés and ...restaurants, and the national sports stadium. On Bastille Day in 2016, an ISIS sympathizer drove a truck into crowds of vacationers at the beaches of Nice, and two weeks later an elderly French priest was murdered during morning Mass by two ISIS militants. Here is Gilles Kepel's explosive account of the radicalization of a segment of Muslim youth that led to those attacks-and of the failure of governments in France and across Europe to address it. It is a book everyone in the West must read.
Terror in Franceshows how these atrocities represent a paroxysm of violence that has long been building. The turning point was in 2005, when the worst riots in modern French history erupted in the poor, largely Muslim suburbs of Paris after the accidental deaths of two boys who had been running from the police. The unrest-or "French intifada"-crystallized a new consciousness among young French Muslims. Some have fallen prey to the allure of "war of civilizations" rhetoric in ways never imagined by their parents and grandparents.
This is the highly anticipated English edition of Kepel's sensational French bestseller, first published shortly after the Paris attacks. Now fully updated to reflect the latest developments and featuring a new introduction by the author,Terror in Francereveals the truth about a virulent new wave of jihadism that has Europe as its main target. Its aim is to divide European societies from within by instilling fear, provoking backlash, and achieving the ISIS dream-shared by Europe's Far Right-of separating Europe's growing Muslim minority community from the rest of its citizens.
Regression analysis was used to estimate the share of non-economic influences on the level of development of mortgage housing loan markets in the EU and CEE countries in the overall impact of ...economic and non-economic factors.
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