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Due to stakeholders’ concerns on the contribution of corporate governance in monitoring insurance companies during financial crisis, this study aims to investigate whether and how various corporate governance practices would have affected firm performance of listed and non-listed insurance firms in the UK during financial crisis.

This study uses a unique manually collected data set from listed and non-listed insurance firms in the UK and applies different regressions models to test the hypotheses and to address the endogeneity problem.

The findings show that board non-duality and the presence of a majority shareholder improve firm performance in insurance companies. Furthermore, the findings for the sub-samples indicate a stronger positive association between board of directors and firm performance in listed insurance companies after the financial crisis, while a positive impact has been found between large shareholders and external audit firms in non-listed insurance companies before and during the crisis.

The results offer important practical implications for the government, management, shareholders and policymakers. For example, regulators and policymakers should benefit from these results to revise the recommendations for corporate governance mechanisms that prove to be effective on firm performance, as well as those mechanisms that have different or unexpected effects among listed or non-listed firms and/or during the turbulent periods. Investors should be aware of those specific corporate governance mechanisms that would have higher effect on performance of UK insurance firms in which they are considering to invest in.

This study contributes to the current literature by exploring the effect of corporate governance on financial performance by comparing between listed and non-listed insurance companies during financial crisis. Further, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use two new insurance-related performance measures, the revenue growth ratio and the adjusted combined ratio, as performance proxies to explore whether these new variables create any insights.

Insurance is a contract whereby one party (the policyholder) promises and makes a payment or series of payments in exchange for the second party’s (the insurance company’s) promise to indemnify the policyholder for losses covered under the terms of the policy. Perhaps it is easier to just think of insurance as a transaction where the policyholder trades small regular losses (the premium paid) for large and irregular gains (claims proceeds).

While it may seem somewhat disproportionate to devote an entire chapter to more detailed treatment of a single risk financing tool, insurance has a very large impact, not only in terms of its intrinsic value, but also in terms of the many ways in which insurance influences risk management thinking and practice. As will be shown, some of this influence is waning and in other cases it could be argued that insurance ‘thinking’ has hindered efforts to respond to facts on the ground and the ability to adapt the role of risk management in organisations.

To provide a useful discussion, this chapter will cover both the products that the insurance industry offers and the structure of the industry itself, along with addressing legal and regulatory matters that were touched upon in Chapter Nine. The chapter concludes with an overview of public sector insurance issues that provides a basis for understanding alternatives to insurance that have emerged in dramatic fashion in recent decades – which in turn provides a basis for considering some of the constraints that insurance imposes on risk management practice.

The purpose of this article is to examine the existence of underwriting cycles in property‐liability insurance for Switzerland, the USA, Japan, and West Germany over a period of 40 years (1957‐1997), i.e. it looks at the question of whether the unit price of insurance coverage (given by the inverse of the loss ratio) fluctuates cyclically over time. The article serves as basis and starting point for Part II, where some of the limitations of the model presented here are dealt with.

Loss ratio data for the four countries are used for the recent period 1957‐1997. To test for the existence of cycles and calculate their length, the article applies autoregressive processes of second order, which were brought to a broader audience by a paper by Cummins and Outreville in 1987. The article also conducts a spectral analysis of the series.

For West Germany, much longer cycles than in earlier studies were found for the basic model. In general, the cycles get longer for the longer period, 1957‐1997. The article concludes that the hypothesis of cycles of six years in length no longer holds globally. It also finds cross‐country differences for the primary markets of the four countries.

Most empirical work on underwriting cycles has so far been carried out on US data. This study replicates a previous study for four countries on three continents and discusses the results and some limitations. It serves as the basis for Part II of this work.

Several studies have observed that stocks tend to drop by an amount that is less than the dividend on the ex-dividend day, the so-called ex-dividend day anomaly. However, there still remains a lack of consensus for a single explanation of this anomaly. Different from other studies, this dissertation attempts to answer the primary research question: how can investors make trading profits from the ex-dividend day anomaly and how much can they earn? With this goal, I examine the economic motivations of equity investors through four main hypotheses identified in the anomaly's literature: the tax differential hypothesis, the short-term trading hypothesis, the tick size hypothesis, and the leverage hypothesis.

While the U.S. ex-dividend anomaly is well studied, I examine a long data window (1975–2010) of Thailand data. The unique structure of the Thai stock market allows me to assess all four main hypotheses proposed in the literature simultaneously. Although I extract the sample data from two data sources, I demonstrate that the combined data are consistently sampled. I further construct three trading strategies – “daily return,” “lag one daily return,” and “weekly return” – to alleviate the potential effect of irregular data observation.

I find that the ex-dividend day anomaly exists in Thailand, is governed by the tax differential, and is driven by short-term trading activities. That is, investors trade heavily around the ex-dividend day to reap the benefits of the tax differential. I find mixed results for the predictions of the tick size hypothesis and results that are inconsistent with the predictions of the leverage hypothesis.

I conclude that, on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, juristic and foreign investors can profitably buy stocks cum-dividend and sell them ex-dividend while local investors should engage in short sale transactions. On average, investors who employ the daily return strategy have earned significant abnormal return up to 0.15% (45.66% annualized rate) and up to 0.17% (50.99% annualized rate) for the lag one daily return strategy. Investors can also make a trading profit by conducting the weekly return strategy and earn up to 0.59% (35.67% annualized rate), on average.

Sees the objective of teaching financial management to be to help managers and potential managers to make sensible investment and financing decisions. Acknowledges that financial theory teaches that investment and financing decisions should be based on cash flow and risk. Provides information on payback period; return on capital employed, earnings per share effect, working capital, profit planning, standard costing, financial statement planning and ratio analysis. Seeks to combine the practical rules of thumb of the traditionalists with the ideas of the financial theorists to form a balanced approach to practical financial management for MBA students, financial managers and undergraduates.

The purpose of this paper is twofold, first, to develop an effective tool to assess the performance of the overall economy by creating an assessment ratio that reflects the two top priorities of monetary policy, promoting economic growth and maintaining price stability, and second, to use the annual assessment ratios to build two subsamples, outperformance (better than the historical average) and underperformance, to examine and compare the changes in impacts of monetary and fiscal policy tools on important economic variables in different economic conditions, instead of different time periods.

The assessment ratio is defined as the gross domestic product (GDP) gap/standard deviation of inflation. Essentially, this Growth/Volatility ratio quantifies the price volatility-adjusted long-term output growth, that is, the long-term output growth given 1 per cent of the standard deviation of inflation. The growth has a positive impact on the ratio, while the effect of price volatility is negative. The ratio reflects not only the Fed’s dual goal but also the fundamental economic conditions. A higher value of the ratio indicates that the economy can better handle inflation risk in driving the long-term output growth. As the inflation level is adjusted in the numerator (GDP gap), not the denominator, no matter the Fed is engaging in the fight against inflation, or for reflation (promoting inflation) to prevent deflation and pursue price stability (Bernanke, 2002), the ratio remains consistent with the Fed’s dual goal and prefers a higher value.

Results of this study suggest that impacts of monetary and fiscal policy tools on key economic variables may be cyclic as the economic condition changes. The policy tools can significantly affect inflation volatility and the price volatility-adjusted long-term real output growth in the subpar economic conditions identified with lower assessment ratios. The effects become insignificant when the general economic performance exceeds the historical average. More importantly, results of this study indicate that the funds rate can effectively lower the price volatility, while the fiscal tools can promote long-term real output growth in the subpar economic conditions. Therefore, when inflation volatility spikes and the real output growth slows, the decisive and timely monetary and fiscal policy decisions become necessary to enhance policy effectiveness.

The assessments of effectiveness of monetary policy in the literature are based on some or all of four descriptive statistics: inflation, inflation volatility, output growth, and growth volatility. Each of them measures only one aspect of an economic phenomenon and cannot reflect the well-known conflicting relationship between maintaining price stability and promoting economic growth. For instance, from the policy perspective, a higher price volatility combined with a higher GDP growth rate for one period may or may not outperform another period with lower price volatility and growth rate. However, the assessment ratio created in this study considers both price volatility and economic growth simultaneously and can, therefore, be used as an effective measure of the overall economic performance.

This study investigates the diversification benefits of multiple cryptocurrencies and their usefulness as investment assets, individually or combined, in enhancing the performance of a well-diversified portfolio of traditional assets before and during the pandemic COVID-19.

This paper uses two optimization techniques, namely the mean-variance and the maximum Sharpe ratio. The naïve diversification rules are used for comparison. Besides, the Sharpe and the Sortino ratios are used as performance measures.

The results show that cryptocurrencies diversification benefits occur more during the COVID-19 pandemic rather than before it, with the maximum Sharpe ratio portfolio presenting its highest performance. Furthermore, the results suggest that, during COVID-19, the diversification benefits are slightly better when using a combination of cryptocurrencies to an already well-diversified portfolio of traditional assets rather than individual ones. This serves to improve the performance of the maximum Sharpe ratio portfolio, and to some extent, the naïve portfolio. Yet, cryptocurrencies, whether added individually or combined to a well-diversified portfolio of traditional assets, don't fit in the minimum variance portfolio. Besides, the efficient frontier during COVID-19 pandemic dominates the one before COVID-19 pandemic, giving the investor a better risk-return trade-off.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study that examines the diversification benefits of multiple cryptocurrencies both as individual investments and as additional asset classes, before and during COVID-19 pandemic. The paper covers all analyses performed separately in previous studies, which brings new evidence regarding the potential for cryptocurrencies in portfolio diversification under different portfolio strategies.

The major objective of any business organization should be to create value for its stockholders or owners. If the stock of a publicly held corporation does not provide its shareholders with a return that increases their wealth, that corporation is not meeting its most fundamental obligation.

We highlight key assumptions implicit in the models used by academics conducting research on market efficiency. Most notably, many academics assume that investors can borrow unlimited amounts and construct long-short portfolios at zero cost. We relax these assumptions and examine the attractiveness of long-short strategies as stand-alone investments and as a part of a diversified portfolio. Our analysis illustrates that the key benefit of long-short investing is adding diversification to a portfolio beyond what the market provides. We show that as stand-alone investments, nontrivial risk remains in the “hedge” strategies and that the returns generally do not beat the market in a head-to-head contest. Our findings raise questions about the degree of inefficiency in anomaly studies because plausible measures of costs generally offset strategy returns. The ability to achieve greater diversification may be, but is not necessarily, due to market inefficiency. We also highlight the key role of the generally ignored but critically important short interest rebate and show that absent this rebate, the long-short strategies we examine generally yield insignificant returns.