Reputation is widely regarded as a stabilizing factor in financial institutions, reducing capital constraints and enhancing firm resilience. However, in the insurance industry, where capital requirements are shaped by solvency regulations and policyholder behavior, the effects of reputation on capital management remain unclear. This paper examines the unintended consequences of reputation in insurance asset-liability management, focusing on its impact on capital allocation. Using a novel reputation risk measure based on large language models (LLMs) and actuarial models, we show that reputation shifts influence surrender rates, altering capital requirements. While higher reputation reduces surrender risk, it increases capital demand for investment-oriented insurance products, whereas protection products remain largely unaffected. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that reputation always eases capital constraints, highlighting the need for insurers to integrate reputation management with capital planning to avoid unintended capital strain.

Using a new case-level dataset we document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the staggered introduction of specialized courts across Chi- nese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. For identification, we compare bankruptcy cases handled by specialized versus traditional civil courts within the same city and filed in the same year. We find that specialized courts decrease case duration by 36% relative to traditional civil courts. We provide evi- dence consistent with court specialization increasing efficiency via selection of better trained judges and higher judicial independence from local politicians. We docu- ment that cities introducing specialized courts experience a relative reallocation of employment out of zombie firms-intensive sectors, as well as faster firm entry and a larger increase in average capital productivity.

We develop a portfolio-choice model to investigate how regulatory reforms influence the risk-taking behavior of financial institutions with different capital adequacy levels. The model predicts that either all firms reduce their risk-taking, or there exists a capital-adequacy threshold below which risk-taking increases as regulation becomes more stringent. The Chinese insurance solvency regulatory reform provides a unique natural experiment to test our theory. In 2015, each insurer reported two solvency ratios under the original and the new regulatory systems. The difference between them produces an exogenous and insurer-specific measure of the regulatory pressure shock. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that increasing regulatory pressure induces greater risk-taking for less capital-adequate insurers, of which the regulator should want to reduce risk-taking mostly. We show that increasing the penalties of insolvency, increasing the risk sensitivity of capital requirements, and reinforcing the qualitative risk assessment are effective policy remedies for this backfiring problem.

We develop a model of a financial institution to study how shareholder—debt holder conflicts interact with prudential capital regulation and accounting measurement rules. Our analysis highlights the result that, for highly leveraged financial institutions—when prudential regulation play an important role—debt overhang and asset substitution inefficiencies work in opposing directions. We demonstrate that, relative to the “historical cost” regime in which assets and liabilities on an institution’s balance sheet are measured at their origination values, fair value could alleviate the inefficiencies arising from asset substitution, but exacerbate those arising from underinvestment due to debt overhang. The optimal choices of accounting regime and prudential solvency constraint balance the conflicts between shareholders and debt holders. Under fair value accounting, the optimal solvency constraint declines with the institution’s marginal cost of investment in project quality and the excess cost of equity capital relative to debt capital. Fair value accounting dominates historical cost accounting provided the solvency constraints in the respective regimes take their optimal values. If the solvency constraints are sub-optimally chosen, however, historical cost accounting could dominate fair value accounting.

基于保险监管视角，借鉴欧盟“偿付能力II”相关理论，对市场风险运用幂阶转换在险价值（Normal Power Approximation Value-at-Risk），并进行波动率时间序列建模；对保险风险运用精算模型；对信用风险和操作风险则借用巴塞尔新资本协议的相关标准模型，实证分析了我国财险公司的偿付能力资本需求。结果显示：偿付能力资本需求（Solvency capital requirement, SCR）是最低资本需求（Minimal capital requirement, MCR）的1.928倍，表明以风险为基础计算的资本需求远大于基于业务量大小的资本需求。

An asset manager trades o? the bene?ts of higher leverage against the costs of adjusting leverage in order to mitigate expected insolvency losses. We explicitly calculate optimal dynamic incentive-compatible leverage policies in simple versions of this problem.

This paper is the first attempt in the literature to study the relationship between corporate governance and corporate growth. By developing an econometric model, this paper empirically studied the relationship between corporate governance and growth capability of China’s listed companies based on the panel data of 510 listed companies in Chinese manufacturing industry from the year 2001 to 2007. Main findings and contributions of this paper are as follows: ownership concentration is significantly negatively associated with growth capability; there is a significant negative relationship between equity restriction ratio and growth capability; growth capability of non-state-holding company is stronger than that of state-holding company, but this finding has no statistical significance; the stronger are debt solvency and debt financing ability, the stronger is growth capability; scale of board of directors and proportion of independent directors are significantly negatively associated with growth capability; combination of chairman of board of directors and CEO is beneficial for enhancing growth capability; management annual salary is significantly positively associated with growth capability; proportion of management shareholding has a negative relationship with growth capability, but this has no statistical significance; competition of market for corporate control and perfection degree of law basis and interest protection of medium-small investors are positively associated with growth capability, but these findings have no statistical significance; there is a significant positive relationship between product market competition and growth capability. Based on the above conclusions, this paper put forward some relevant policy recommendations from perspective of corporate governance for enhancing growth capability of Chinese listed companies.