This innovative book provides the first detailed analysis of the increasing convergence of banking and insurance in the retail area, a trend commonly referred to as bancassurance. In the first part of the book industry- and firm-level characteristics are analysed which contribute to the increasing level of cross-industry penetration in the banking and insurance sector. The second part of the book provides for the first time a detailed account of banks' entry strategies into insurance. It thereby focuses on identifying the key factors which determine whether or not entry will be successful.

Bislang war Ungarn in der vergleichenden Wohlfahrtsstaatsforschung kaum beachtet worden. Das Buch des an der Universitat Szeged (Ungarn) lehrenden Autors beschreibt nun die Entwicklung des ungarischen Wohlfahrtsstaates im 20. Jahrhundert, einschliesslich der kommunistischen Ara, und analysiert insbesondere deren konvergierenden und divergierenden Grundzuge in einem westeuropaischen vergleichenden Kontext. Neben der Ausgabenentwicklung wird auch die Entwicklung von Institutionen und sozialen Rechten untersucht. Aus dem Inhalt: Kap. 1: Changes in welfare expenditures Kap. 2: Major structural characteristics of welfare Kap. 3: Development of social rights Kap. 4: Organization and control Kap. 5: Determinants of welfare development Bibliography Tables Appendix"

Presents the policies and strategies of a wide-ranging group of ministerial personalities, central bankers, regulators and chief or senior executives of major financial and industrial groups. Their vision of the future is based on their high-level experience.

Risk compensation postulates that everyone has a "risk thermostat" and that safety measures that do not affect the setting of the thermostat will be circumvented by behaviour that re-establishes the level of risk with which people were originally comfortable. It explains why, for example, motorists drive faster after a bend in the road is straightened. Cultural theory explains risk-taking behaviour by the operation of cultural filters. It postulates that behaviour is governed by the probable costs and benefits of alternative courses of action which are perceived through filters formed from all the previous incidents and associations in the risk-taker's life.; "Risk" should be of interest to many readers throughout the social sciences and in the world of industry, business, engineering, finance and public administration, since it deals with a fundamental part of human behaviour that has enormous financial and economic implications.

This handbook offers a unique and original collection of analytical studies in Islamic economics and finance, and constitutes a humble addition to the literature on new economic thinking and global finance. The growing risks stemming from higher debt, slower growth, and limited room for policy maneuver raise concerns about the ability and propensity of modern economies to find effective solutions to chronic problems. It is important to understand the structural roots of inherent imbalance, persistence-in-error patterns, policy and governance failures, as well as moral and ethical failures. Admittedly, finance and economics have their own failures, with abstract theory bearing little relation with the real economy, uncertainties and vicissitudes of economic life. Economic research has certainly become more empirical despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of guidance from theory. The analytics of Islamic economics and finance may not differ from standard frameworks, methods, and techniques used in conventional economics, but may offer new perspectives on the making of financial crises, nature of credit cycles, roots of financial system instability, and determinants of income disparities. The focus is placed on the logical coherence of Islamic economics and finance, properties of Islamic capital markets, workings of Islamic banking, pricing of Islamic financial instruments, and limits of debt financing, fiscal stimulus and conventional monetary policies, inter alia. Readers with investment, regulatory, and academic interests will find the body of analytical evidence to span many areas of economic inquiry, refuting thereby the false argument that given its religious tenets, Islamic economics is intrinsically narrative, descriptive and not amenable to testable implications. Thus, the handbook may contribute toward a redefinition of a dismal science in search for an elusive balance between rationality, ethics and morality, and toward a remodeling of economies based on risk sharing and prosperity for all humanity

This book makes a substantial contribution to the general level of management education in insurance by providing a comprehensive review of the main issues facing the management of insurance enterprises. Nineteen authors with considerable practical as well as academic experience have collaborated to give an international perspective in areas such as strategy, corporate planning, organisation and staffing, costing, underwriting and premium rating, marketing, reserving and investment, profit analysis, and regulation.

In this comprehensive volume, leading experts on health policy consider a broad range of Medicare-related issues. They assess the effects of Medicare policy over the last twenty years, analyze the impact of changing economic and demographic conditions, and consider how best to implement successful reform of the troubled system.

This book offers a timely and important analysis of the health insurance crisis in America. Relying on data from a wide range of publications about the health insurance industry, it investigates the causes of the industry's problems and analyzes the social effects of the growing crisis.

When the topic of death is a taboo subject to a population, how can life insurance companies create a market for their business? In Marketing Death, Cheris Shun-ching Chan examines the development of the life insurance market in China to address how culture impacts economic practice. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of various life insurance companies in China, Chan found a clear disparity in the way transnational and domestic life insurers dealt with local resistance to the idea of insuring against early death. While the transnational insurers attempted to remove this resistance by introducing new concepts about risk management, the locally-founded insurers redefined these concepts as money management to avoid the taboo subject. The domestic players' strategies proved to be more effective, but conflicted with the profit-oriented institutional logic of life insurance in the Chinese context. Having learned a lesson from significant losses, the domestic insurers eventually collaborated with their transnational counterparts to create a risk-management market. Nonetheless, local potential buyers, with their ingrained cultural values, continue to negotiate with insurance providers about their preferred product features. Chan argues that the life insurance business is growing rapidly in China despite these incompatible local cultural values largely because insurance practitioners strategically mobilized the local cultural tool-kit to circumvent the resistance. In Chan's account, the interplay of two forms of culture-a shared meaning system on one hand and a repertoire of strategies on the other-has significantly shaped the trajectory of the emergent Chinese market. Marketing Death is the first book to offer an analysis of the emergence of a life insurance market outside of the Euro-American context. It documents the processes and politics by which local cultures shape the way a market is formed and, hence, sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises diffuse to regions with different cultural traditions.

Environmental sustainability is perhaps the key societal challenge of our times. Achieving it will require a significant level of financing and investment, and here the role of the banking industry is fundamental. Banks can play a broader and far-reaching role by adopting environmental concerns in their internal and external business operations. Principles of Green Banking is a comprehensive account of the different aspects of green banking and offers theories and principles as well as practical how-to guidelines to adopt green banking practices. This book discusses why green banking is central to achieving sustainable development. It illustrates the evolution of green banking around the world, different types of environmental risks created by firms and how these risks offer threats to sustain ability, and ongoing trends and patterns of green banking practice. Critically, it also presents an outline of the regulatory framework necessary to help the entire banking sector adapt to the change towards green banking. It is a valuable resource for financial sector professionals and scholars in the fields of sustainable finance and banking.

The quantitative modeling of complex systems of interacting risks is a fairly recent development in the financial and insurance industries. Over the past decades, there has been tremendous innovation and development in the actuarial field. In addition to undertaking mortality and longevity risks in traditional life and annuity products, insurers face unprecedented financial risks since the introduction of equity-linking insurance in 1960s. As the industry moves into the new territory of managing many intertwined financial and insurance risks, non-traditional problems and challenges arise, presenting great opportunities for technology development. Today's computational power and technology make it possible for the life insurance industry to develop highly sophisticated models, which were impossible just a decade ago. Nonetheless, as more industrial practices and regulations move towards dependence on stochastic models, the demand for computational power continues to grow. While the industry continues to rely heavily on hardware innovations, trying to make brute force methods faster and more palatable, we are approaching a crossroads about how to proceed. An Introduction to Computational Risk Management of Equity-Linked Insurance provides a resource for students and entry-level professionals to understand the fundamentals of industrial modeling practice, but also to give a glimpse of software methodologies for modeling and computational efficiency. Features Provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to quantitative risk management of equity-linked insurance with exercises and programming samples Includes a collection of mathematical formulations of risk management problems presenting opportunities and challenges to applied mathematicians Summarizes state-of-arts computational techniques for risk management professionals Bridges the gap between the latest developments in finance and actuarial literature and the practice of risk management for investment-combined life insurance Gives a comprehensive review of both Monte Carlo simulation methods and non-simulation numerical methods Runhuan Feng is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and the Director of Actuarial Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst. He is a Helen Corley Petit Professorial Scholar and the State Farm Companies Foundation Scholar in Actuarial Science. Runhuan received a Ph.D. degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Prior to joining Illinois, he held a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was named a Research Fellow. Runhuan received numerous grants and research contracts from the Actuarial Foundation and the Society of Actuaries in the past. He has published a series of papers on top-tier actuarial and applied probability journals on stochastic analytic approaches in risk theory and quantitative risk management of equity-linked insurance. Over the recent years, he has dedicated his efforts to developing computational methods for managing market innovations in areas of investment combined insurance and retirement planning.

The book offers a comprehensive analysis of insurance intermediaries from a capital markets perspective. It presents an up-to-date market perspective, drawing the attention to the important trends and developments in the industry and recommends strategies to secure future growth. Further, it offers a detailed description of a valuation approach specifically tailored to small and mid-sized brokers. Research on insurance intermediary M&A reveals that positive abnormal returns are achieved for acquirers. The author points out which factors lead to value creation and investigates performance drivers in the tied agent channel.

Proceedings of the First International Insurance Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 1957

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A timely guide to understanding and implementing credit derivatives

Credit derivatives are here to stay and will continue to play a role in finance in the future. But what will that role be? What issues and challenges should be addressed? And what lessons can be learned from the credit mess?

"Credit Risk Frontiers" offers answers to these and other questions by presenting the latest research in this field and addressing important issues exposed by the financial crisis. It covers this subject from a real world perspective, tackling issues such as liquidity, poor data, and credit spreads, as well as the latest innovations in portfolio products and hedging and risk management techniques.Provides a coherent presentation of recent advances in the theory and practice of credit derivativesTakes into account the new products and risk requirements of a post financial crisis worldContains information regarding various aspects of the credit derivative market as well as cutting edge research regarding those aspects

If you want to gain a better understanding of how credit derivatives can help your trading or investing endeavors, then "Credit Risk Frontiers" is a book you need to read.

Whether man-made or naturally occurring, large-scale disasters can cause fatalities and injuries, devastate property and communities, savage the environment, impose significant financial burdens on individuals and firms, and test political leadership. Moreover, global challenges such as climate change and terrorism reveal the interdependent and interconnected nature of our current moment: what occurs in one nation or geographical region is likely to have effects across the globe. Our information age creates new and more integrated forms of communication that incur risks that are difficult to evaluate, let alone anticipate. All of this makes clear that innovative approaches to assessing and managing risk are urgently required. When catastrophic risk management was in its inception thirty years ago, scientists and engineers would provide estimates of the probability of specific types of accidents and their potential consequences. Economists would then propose risk management policies based on those experts' estimates with little thought as to how this data would be used by interested parties. Today, however, the disciplines of finance, geography, history, insurance, marketing, political science, sociology, and the decision sciences combine scientific knowledge on risk assessment with a better appreciation for the importance of improving individual and collective decision-making processes. The essays in this volume highlight past research, recent discoveries, and open questions written by leading thinkers in risk management and behavioral sciences. The Future of Risk Management provides scholars, businesses, civil servants, and the concerned public tools for making more informed decisions and developing long-term strategies for reducing future losses from potentially catastrophic events. Contributors: Mona Ahmadiani, Joshua D. Baker, W. J. Wouter Botzen, Cary Coglianese, Gregory Colson, Jeffrey Czajkowski, Nate Dieckmann, Robin Dillon, Baruch Fischhoff, Jeffrey A. Friedman, Robin Gregory, Robert W. Klein, Carolyn Kousky, Howard Kunreuther, Craig E. Landry, Barbara Mellers, Robert J. Meyer, Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Robert Muir-Wood, Mark Pauly, Lisa Robinson, Adam Rose, Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Paul Slovic, Phil Tetlock, Daniel Vastfjall, W. Kip Viscusi, Elke U. Weber, Richard Zeckhauser.