Volume 6, Issue 1

Political risk is an important consideration in the capital budgeting process for firms contemplating foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging markets or in volatile political environments. Unfortunately, the unique characteristics of political risk make the application of familiar actuarially-based pricing models almost infeasible for valuating political risk insurance. In this article we employ utility theory instead to derive an equilibrium price (premium). This price maximizes an insurer’s expected profit and the insured’s expected utility, while taking into account the effects of risk control (self-protection) and risk financing (self-insurance). In addition, within this equilibrium framework, we derive the boundary level for the amount of foreign investment, the amount of political risk insurance coverage, and the minimum required rate of return of foreign investment. Finally, we employ a constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility function to illustrate the theoretical equilibrium model.

The failure of some disaster insurance market has been a very serious problem. This paper focuses on why disaster reinsurance fails and how that will affect the availability of primary disaster insurance. The insurer’s unexpected costs are added to the expected costs associated with the insured event to illustrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of disaster insurance and reinsurance. Particularly, investors’ negative response to an insurer’s huge, disaster-related liability exposures may lead to availability problem unless the insurer’s asset value losses in the financial market can be minimized. A large insurer may be more likely to withdraw from underwriting disaster insurance. Three different pricing schemes for disaster reinsurance contracts are investigated. The one which is based on the Option Pricing Theory is rejected because it leads to market failure.

The paper reviews the link between demographic shifts and financial products and markets, focusing especially on Asian based APEC economies. It argues that newly developed and emerging APEC economies will need to nurture private sector institutions, which, in partnership with government, can deliver the financial services that the elderly will need. We offer metrics that provide guidance as to whether the required governance and private business competence exist in these economies and suggest measures for improvement. We discuss financial innovation, especially in the arena of products and markets dealing with risks confronted by the elderly, which may provide opportunities for easing the burden of population aging. Finally, we ask what APEC as an organization might be able to achieve through co-operative international agreements.

This article proposes the modified logistic mortality model as a potential moderation of current models. The fitting and forecasting effects of the proposed modified logistic mortality model are efficient for the mortality data of the United States, Japan, England and Wales, and the modified logistic model provides the best forecasting for persons older than age 30 years under MAPE criterion. In addition, this study considers how to use longevity bonds to manage longevity risk. We apply the proposed modified logistic mortality model to price the bond, and to improve the attractiveness of that bond, we design it to encompass more than one tranche, according to the concept of collateral debt obligation. This design offers investors more choices pertaining to their different risk preferences.

In this paper, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of the finite-time ruin probability in a general risk model with constant interest force, in which the claims are of a widely upper orthant dependence structure, belonging to the intersection of long-tailed class and dominant variation class, and arriving according to an arbitrary counting process. The results we obtained can extend and improve some existing results.

Information on risks faced by a company is important for an investor and the public in general. Due to its forward-looking nature, the statement on possible risks is particularly beneficial and suitable for investor’s decision-making. This is why e.g. IFRS 7 focusing on the financial instruments was introduced. By analysing the annual reports regarding its content, we can assess information quality of the reports. Our findings suggest that the incentives to disclose seem to be low with some qualitative information but with next to no information in a quantitative way. Future regulation should address this issue and work on higher information quality.