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This study is designed to investigate how the use of reinsurance affects the primary insurers' profitability and pricing on their insurance products.

This study examines the impact of reinsurance on the insurers’ profitability using a two stage least square to control the endogeneity problem with a reinsurance variable. The study analyzes 11,894 firm-year observations between 2001 and 2009.

The study finds that the use of reinsurance in general has a negative impact on property/casualty insurers' performance. However, reinsurance obtained from affiliated firms has a positive impact on profitability, which supports the existence of internal capital markets in the insurance industry.

The finding of study implies that reinsurance transactions are used among affiliated insurers for not only managing underwriting risk and increasing underwriting capacity but also subsidizing capital through internal capital markets. In term of limitation, due to the availability of price data, this study uses only one insurance cycle of 9 years, albeit not weakening the findings.

Especially for non-affiliated insurers, the finding suggests that they need to find an alternative way to transfer underwriting risk without having to use costly reinsurance.

This paper directly investigates the impact of reinsurance utilization on insurers' profitability and pricing.

Although previous studies have attempted to isolate the effect of pharmaceutical spending on health outcomes, most have been limited by analysis of inherently heterogeneous inter-country data. This study focuses on one particular health outcome — infant mortality at the state level in the U.S. — and shows that its important determinants include: (1) pharmaceutical expenditures; (2) health economic infrastructure (e.g. number of practicing physicians, number of hospital beds); (3) socio-demographics (e.g. teenage birth rate, low-weight births, high school graduation rate, racial composition of state population); and (4) state-level economic aggregates (e.g. a disposable income, percent of population below the poverty line).

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on India's performance in sanitation over the last decade as it strives to meet the Millennium Development Goal target.

In doing so, both qualitative and quantitative analyses are employed. The latter method includes a regression analysis. Income and income inequality variables have been included in the analysis.

Whilst India has made progress towards achieving access to sanitation for its people, the nation continues to perform relatively poorly to its neighbours and on a comparative global basis. At the national level, substantial rural-urban and income disparities are linked to a reduced level of sanitation access. Both forms of analysis support the view that income inequality in India is directly related to a lack of sanitation facilities.

The study is based on secondary data gathered from WHO and UNICEF sources. These are national data gathered by these agencies in two periods. These are aggregated data.

The study has major practical implications in policy formation in the area of sanitation access to both rural and urban India. The state level data analysed by the study will also be useful to make policies at disaggregated level. India, indeed, needs to improve the conditions on an urgent basis. Even in South Asia standard, this nation is behind from almost all other nations of the region.

The social implications are to make people particularly poor aware about the sanitation issue lack of which contributes to health hazards and gestro condition for children and old. The sanitation related diseases contribute to huge loss of working hours in both rural and urban communities.

The study contributes original ideas and demonstrates with a simple regression analysis how sanitation depends on income and income inequality of the poor.

This article examines how reinsurance coupled with new financial instruments can expand coverage to areas exposed to catastrophe losses from natural disasters, and demonstrates how reinsurance and the catastrophe‐linked financial instruments can be combined to lower the price of protection from its current level. A simple example illustrates the relative advantages and disadvantages of pure catastrophic bonds and pure indemnity reinsurance in supporting a structure of payments contingent on certain extreme events occurring. The authors suggest ways to combine these two instruments using customized catastrophe indices to expand coverage and reduce the cost of protection. This article states six principles for designing catastrophic risk transfer systems and discusses practical issues for implementation, and then concludes with suggestions for future research.

Review of various models of the fear communication process and research on the effectiveness of fear appeals indicates that fear arousal is a complex, individually unique emotion. Inconsistent results concerning the impact of fear appeals in consumer behavior are noted. Issues arising from employing fear appeals in advertising are outlined and practical guidelines for their use are presented.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, this paper measures how much liquidity is transformed by the US life insurance industry for the sample period; and Second, this study tests the “risk absorption” hypothesis and “financial fragility-crowding out” hypothesis to identify the impact of capital on liquidity creation in the US life insurance industry. In addition, a regression model is conducted to explore the relationship between liquidity creation and other firm characteristics.

In order to construct the liquidity creation measures, all assets and liabilities are classified as liquid, semi-liquid, or illiquid with appropriate weights to these classifications, which will then be combined to measure the amount of liquidity creation. In addition, a regression model is analyzed. The level of insurers’ liquidity creation is regressed on the capital ratio (surplus over total assets) and other financial and organizational variables to test two prevailing hypotheses.

This paper finds that the US life insurers de-create liquidity. The authors provide that the amount of liquidity de-creation is related to the size of insurers such that liquidity de-creation has increased as assets grow and that large insurers de-create most of liquidity. The US life insurance industry de-created $2.1 trillion in liquidity, i.e., 43 percent of total industry assets, in 2008. The empirical results support the “financial fragility-crowding out” hypothesis. Life insurers’ liquidity de-creation is mainly caused by the large portion of liquid assets, which is required by regulation and capital is not a main factor of liquidity de-creation.

There is no known study on the issue of liquidity creation by life insurers. Thus, the extent of liquidity creation by the life insurance industry, if any, is an empirical matter to investigate, but also an important matter to regulators and the academia since the products and business operations (e.g. asset portfolio and asset and liability management) of life insurers are different from those of property and liability insurers.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.