What determines the technology that a country adopts? While there could be many factors, the e¢ ciency of the country’s …nancial system may play a signi…cant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation. The ability of an intermediary to monitor and control the cash ‡ows of a …rm plays an important role i...

Banks are an important source of funding in economies all around the world, making it vital to understand how banks directly and indirectly affect funding through capital markets. Few issues have perhaps been as controversial as the appropriate scope of bank activities and whether banks should participate directly in capital market activities, providing both lending and other services, such as ...

Previous research finds some evidence that analysts affiliated with equity underwriters issue more optimistic earnings growth forecasts and optimistic recommendations of client stock than unaffiliated analysts. Unfortunately, these studies are unable to discriminate between three competing hypotheses for the apparent optimism. Under the bribery hypothesis, underwriting clients, with the promise...

A quadratic discrete time probabilistic model, for optimal portfolio selection in (re-)insurance is studied. For positive values of underwriting levels, the expected value of the accumulated result is optimized, under constraints on its variance and on annual ROE’s. Existence of a unique solution is proved and a Lagrangian formalism is given. An effective method for solving the Euler-Lagrange e...

In summary, I think the industry is doing the right things to return to profitability. Rates are increasing, underwriting and products are tightening, claim administration is becoming more proactive, and reserves are being strengthened. I think this will lead to future profitability, and future profitability will attract some new companies into the marketplace. The real long-term question is, o...

Genetic studies indicate that the inherited risk of breast cancer is mediated by the well-studied major genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, and a polygenic component, probably with many genes each making a small contribution. Recently, seven polygenes have been found (Pharoah et al., 2008) contributing an estimated 3.6% of all familial risk (Easton et al., 2007) This suggests that the polygenic component ma...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges faced with the initial introduction and use of workflow for underwriting in an insurance company and how these challenges were overcome when the company was faced with the requirement to upgrade the system. Early workflow systems, including one of the original FileNet WorkfloTM system, offered the promise of easy to change, work assignment...

Abstract Background The use of genetic test results in risk-rated insurance is a significant concern internationally, with many countries banning or restricting the underwriting. In Australia, life insurers’ legal and self-regulated by industry (Financial Services Council (FSC)). 2018, an Australian Parliamentary Inquiry recommended that underwriting should be prohibited. 2019, FSC introduced m...

IBM ProbE (for probabilistic estimation) is an extensible, embeddable, and scalable modeling engine, particularly well-suited for implementing segmentation-based modeling techniques, wherein data records are partitioned into segments and separate predictive models are developed for each segment. We describe the ProbE framework and discuss two key business solutions that have been built using Pr...