An Investigation of the Performance of the U.S. Property-Casualty Insurance Industry

Thomas A. Pugel, Anthony Saunders and N. K. Chidambaran

Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers from Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: The authors consider the problem of a risk-averse firm with limited liability. The firm has to select the size of its investment in a risky project. We show that the optimal exposure to risk of the limited liability firm is always larger than under full liability. Moreover, there exists a positive lower bound on the value of the firm below which the firm will "bet for resurrection," i.e. it will invest the largest positive amount in the risky project. We also consider the standard portfolio problem with more than one risky asset. We show that limited liability may induce the firm to specialize in no Mean-Variance efficient assets.

This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Center's May 1996 conference on "

Date: 1996-05
Note: This paper is only available in hard copy
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:pennin:96-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers from Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Krichel ().