Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Business Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Business

Long-Run Risk-Adjusted Performance Of Ipos In The Life Insurance Industry, Lal Chugh, Joseph W. Meador Nov 2006

Long-Run Risk-Adjusted Performance Of Ipos In The Life Insurance Industry, Lal Chugh, Joseph W. Meador

Financial Services Forum Publications

The pace of demutualization among major U.S. life insurance companies increased sharply after the mid-1990s. Five of the fifteen largest U.S. life insurers demutualized between 1997 and 2001, and the largest, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, demutualized in 2000. Ten other major life insurance companies, with total assets in 2003 of $775 billion, demutualized over the same time period. The regulatory and competitive environment in the life insurance industry has changed dramatically in recent years. These changes include: (1) the fact that consumers have shown declining interest in the traditional life insurance products of risk bearing and transfer, while revenues from …


Demutualization In The Life Insurance Industry: A Study Of Effectiveness, Lal Chugh, Joseph W. Meador Nov 2006

Demutualization In The Life Insurance Industry: A Study Of Effectiveness, Lal Chugh, Joseph W. Meador

Financial Services Forum Publications

The regulatory and competitive environment in the life insurance industry has changed dramatically in recent years. We investigate the effectiveness of demutualization as a strategic response to the challenges posed by these sweeping changes. The study finds that the demutualized firms generally have implemented a successful strategy based on higher growth, greater profitability, cost effectiveness and shifts in product mix. Also, we find that management takes greater risk in the investment portfolio. In addition, demutualization unlocks value lying dormant in the mutuals’ surplus. The paper concludes that the demutualized firms have generated substantial excess returns over the several market indexes, …


A Primer On Eva For Healthcare Providers, James L. Grant Nov 2006

A Primer On Eva For Healthcare Providers, James L. Grant

Financial Services Forum Publications

The concept of economic profit (EVA) has proved successful in the field of corporate finance since its adoption by several U.S. and International companies over the past 25 years. Unlike accounting earnings, EVA is a measure of a company’s true earnings because it fully “accounts” for the costs of all forms of financing, including debt and equity. In the EVA view, a company is not truly profitable unless it earns a return on capital that bests the opportunity cost of capital. That being said, the question that we address here is how to measure the economic profit of providers in …


Measures Of Investor Sentiment: Who Wins The Horse Race?, Arindam Bandopadhyaya Nov 2006

Measures Of Investor Sentiment: Who Wins The Horse Race?, Arindam Bandopadhyaya

Financial Services Forum Publications

Traditional research on asset pricing has focused on firm-specific and economywide factors that affect asset prices. Recently, the finance literature has turned to noneconomic factors such as investor sentiment as possible determinants of asset prices. Some researchers (e.g., Eichengreen and Mody, 1998) suggest that a change in one set of asset prices may change investor sentiment, thus triggering changes in a seemingly unrelated set of asset prices, especially in the short run, giving rise to pure contagion. Fisher and Statman (2000) and Baker and Wurgler (2006) have also recognized that investor sentiment may be an important component of the market …


A Survey Of Demographics And Performance In The Hedge Fund Industry, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, James L. Grant Jul 2006

A Survey Of Demographics And Performance In The Hedge Fund Industry, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, James L. Grant

Financial Services Forum Publications

We investigate hedge fund demographics using data from the Alternative Asset Center (AAC) and then hedge fund performance over the twelve years since inception of the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Indices (HFI, 1994-2005). We find that hedge funds are largely domiciled “offshore” while hedge-fund managers are located primarily in the United States, particularly New York, California, Illinois, Connecticut and Florida. We find that the annualized performance of hedge funds as an “asset class” is about the same as that of U.S. equities (S&P 500). That being said, the real benefit of hedge funds lies in risk management as the volatility …