Optimal risk financing in large corporations through insurance captives

A captive is an insurance or reinsurance company established by a parent group to finance its own risks. Captives mix internal risk pooling between the business units of the parent group and risk transfer toward the reinsurance market. We analyze captives from an optimal insurance contract perspective. The paper considers the vertical contractual chain that links firstly business units to insurance captives or to "fronters" through insurance contracts, secondly fronters to reinsurance captives through the cession of risks and thirdly insurance or reinsurance captives to reinsurers through cessions or retrocessions. In particular, the risk cession by fronters to a reinsurance captive trades o¤ the benefits derived from recouped premiums and from the risk sharing advantage of an "umbrella reinsurance policy", against the risks that result from the captive liabilities. The optimal captive scheme depends on the price of coverage in insurance and reinsurance markets and on the parent group's corporate capital. Since these variables fluctuate across time, the analysis developed in this paper corroborates the intertemporal variability of captives activity.self-insurance, captive, reinsurance, risk management

Female Captivity Narratives in Colonial America

The female captivity narrative provides a complex view of colonial American history by recounting the experiences of women captured from their colonial homes by Native Americans. Male editors, often family friends or town ministers, generally compiled the experiences of female captives, and separating the voice of the female captive from influence of the male editor presents a challenge. Puritan captivity narratives in particular demonstrate conflict between attempts by Puritan ministers to impose a unified religious message in the sagas and the captives’ individual experiences, which often contradicted Puritan doctrine. During the early colonial era, ministers’ attempts to promote the Puritan covenant conflicted with the individual salvation testimonies of the female captives. In later narratives, white male editors attempted to impose white cultural values on the female stories, while the captives’ experiences reflected acculturation and integration into Indian society. Female captivity narratives played contradictory roles; while they recorded each captive’s unique experience, male editors often included their own cultural, moral and religious values in the written work

To set the captives free: liberation theology in Canada

Arnal, Oscar L. To set the captives free: liberation theology in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1998

スウェーデン軍捕虜とピョートル改革

The Northern War （1700-1721） caused forcible movements of people, including many war prisoners both from Russia and Sweden. This paper attempts to examine the circumstances of the Swedish prisoners in Russia, rapidly increasing after the Lesnaia battle（ 1708） and the Poltava battle（ 1709）, and their attitudes toward the appeals of the Russian government under Peter I to them to serve in the Russian state organs.Partly because of the lack of international rules on the treatment for captives, both Swedish and Russian war prisoners at the beginning of the 18th century were compelled to endure the difficult situations. For example, in case of the exchange of the captives, they were trifled with the intentions of their governments which tried to get more benefits from each other. Even some of the ministers and generals from Sweden had to end their lives in Russia without returning to their homeland. Additionally, a Swedish captive general critically reported that some war prisoners were forced by the Russian landowners or the local governments to marry or convert their sects.The Petrine government, which accelerated the administrative reforms in the 1710s after the Poltava battle, sometimes called out to the Swedish captives for service in Russia, looking upon them as useful human resources, particularly because the new Russian organizations, including the colleges （kollegiia）, were established on the model of the institutions in Sweden. However, although 13 of 77 non-Russian bureaucrats who worked in the Russian colleges at the end of the 1710s were from the Swedish prisoners, many captives tended to leave Russia after the end of the Northern war. Precisely for this tendency, Peter I seems to have given a warm reception to the former war prisoners who early decided to work for the Russian state, such as Count Douglas

Optimal risk financing in large corporations through insurance captives

A captive is an insurance or reinsurance company established by a parent group to finance its own risks. Captives mix internal risk pooling between the business units of the parent group and risk transfer toward the reinsurance market. We analyze captives from an optimal insurance contract perspective. The paper considers the vertical contractual chain that links firstly business units to insurance captives or to "fronters" through insurance contracts, secondly fronters to reinsurance captives through the cession of risks and thirdly insurance or reinsurance captives to reinsurers through cessions or retrocessions. In particular, the risk cession by fronters to a reinsurance captive trades o¤ the benefits derived from recouped premiums and from the risk sharing advantage of an "umbrella reinsurance policy", against the risks that result from the captive liabilities. The optimal captive scheme depends on the price of coverage in insurance and reinsurance markets and on the parent group's corporate capital. Since these variables fluctuate across time, the analysis developed in this paper corroborates the intertemporal variability of captives activity

Captives

In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that captives of warfare and raiding have had on small- scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past.Focusing primarily on indigenous societies in the Americas while extending the comparative reach to include Europe, Africa, and Island Southeast Asia, Cameron draws on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and archaeological data to examine the roles that captives played in small-scale societies. In such societies, captives represented an almost universal social category consisting predominantly of women and children and constituting 10 to 50 percent of the population in a given society. Cameron demonstrates how captives brought with them new technologies, design styles, foodways, religious practices, and more, all of which changed the captor culture.This book provides a framework that will enable archaeologists to understand the scale and nature of cultural transmission by captives and it will also interest anthropologists, historians, and other scholars who study captive-taking and slavery. Cameron’s exploration of the peculiar amnesia that surrounds memories of captive-taking and enslavement around the world also establishes a connection with unmistakable contemporary relevance

Distant Voices Then and Now: The Impact of Isolation on the Courtroom Narratives of Slave Ship Captives and Asylum Seekers

Part I compares the nineteenth century cases of the Antelope and the Amistad to identify why they resulted in different outcomes despite having similar fact patterns. The Antelope concerned the fate of approximately 280 African captives discovered on a slave trade ship upon its interception by a U.S. revenue cutter. Since the slave trade in the United States was illegal at the time, the captives were transported to Savannah for trial through which their status—free or slave—would be determined. After a lengthy trial and appeals process in which Spain and Portugal laid claim to the captives, the Supreme Court determined that those captives claimed by a non-U.S. nation were slaves. The Court reasons that however “abhorrent” the slave trade was, the United States was obligated to recognize the rights of other nations to participate in it. In comparison, the Amistad concerned the fate of captives aboard a slave trade ship in which the captives committed mutiny, attempted to sail to Africa, but were captured by a U.S. vessel. The Supreme Court ordered them free despite the Spanish government’s claim that the captives were its property. Part I explores these different outcomes and argues that the absence of Antelope captives’ stories in the litigation process was partly due to the decision to isolate captives in slavery before their status was determined. In particular, it argues that this isolation affected the outcome of the Antelope by preventing captives from sharing their anecdotes and translating them to a format that would resonate with their legal counsel, the public, and judges. In contrast, the Amistad captives, while also detained, were situated close to those who could help them. They were able to transform their truths into a winning narrative for the court by understanding and leveraging the talents and expertise of counsel, and the biases of judges and the public. Part II argues that 200 years later, a similar environment of isolation suppresses the stories of another group with undetermined legal status: asylum seekers. Although slave ship captives were forced into the country with chains, while asylum seekers are driven into the country by fear, the legal status of both groups in their respective time periods was undetermined upon their arrival. Both groups deserved, by legal and moral standards, the opportunity to present the truth behind their arrival and to prove their legal status. Part II argues that the detention of asylum seekers mirrors the isolation of the Antelope captives by removing detainees from those most able to help them develop a persuasive narrative truth. Detention silences important voices, aggravates ineffective representation, damages public perception, and ultimately harms case outcomes

Charity without borders: Alms-giving in New Spain for captives in North Africa

Karen Melvin discusses how the plight of Spaniards kidnapped into Muslim slavery in North Africa depended on members of the Mercedarian Order that took a sacred oath common among religious orders to redeem Christian captives. The order supported campaigns against Muslims by serving as priests in armies and by collecting alms and moving to enemy territory to redeem captives. Karen feels that the possible explanation for the increase in ransoming expeditions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might be response to demand if the number of Europeans being taken captive was also rising. Mercedarian appeals for alms in New Spain kept their focus on this conflict instead of its prisoners of war. Captives were a peripheral part of the message. Residents of the New World did not need to have personal acquaintance with captives to care about their struggle that was finally about neither slavery nor captivity

'God was with me in a wonderful manner':the Puritan origins of the Indian captivity narrative

This paper argues that the origins of the Indian captivity narrative should be understood in the historical contexts of its production in the New World as a narrative that is at once descriptive of the personal experiences of frontier captives of the seventeenth century, and is symbolic too of the Puritan errand of separation, settlement and eventual conquest of the land