Why Firms Purchase Property Insurance?

We investigate whether corporate finance incentives aect the extent of corporate hedging with property insurance. Using a database that contains detailed insurance information, we show that rms buy property insurance to reduce the expected costs of distress. Further, we document a scale effect: large rms purchase less insurance per unit of property. This is consistent with the notion that expected bankruptcy costs fall as firm size increases. We also show that the dividend payout ratio exerts a negative inuence on property insurance coverage. This result is consistent with the view that firms with high payout ratio insure a smaller fraction of property because of cash flows in excess of investment needs, easy access to capital markets or both.Corporate Risk Management, Property Insurance

Why firms purchase property insurance

We investigate whether corporate finance incentives affect the extent of corporate hedging with property insurance. Using a database that contains detailed insurance information, we document a positive relation between the expected costs of distress and property insurance coverage. We also show that the dividend payout ratio is negatively associated with property insurance coverage, consistent with the view that firms with high payout ratios insure a smaller fraction of properties due to cash flows in excess of investment needs, easy access to capital markets, or both. Different incentives are important for the insurance deductible and limit of coverage, and the deductible and limit of coverage are substitutes.Corporate risk management Property insurance

EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK WORKING PAPER SERIES WORKING PAPER NO � 209 A FRAMEWORK FOR COLLATERAL RISK CONTROL DETERMINATION 1

This paper derives a general framework for collateral risk control determination in repurchase transactions or repos. The objective is to treat consistently heterogeneous collateral so that the collateral taker has a similar risk exposure whatever the collateral pledged. The framework measures the level of risk with the probability of incurring a loss higher than a pre-specified level given two well known parameters used to manage the intrinsic risk of collateral: marking to market and haircuts. It allows for the analysis in a self contained closed form of the way in which di#erent relevant factors interact in the risk control of collateral (e.g. marking to market frequency, level of volatility of interest rates, time to capture and liquidity risk, probability of default of counterparty, etc.). The framework, which combines the recent theoretical literature on credit and interest risk, provides an alternative quantifiable and objective approach to the existing more ad-hoc rule-based methods used in haircut determination