James Barrese

Institutional Ownership in Financial Services: Performance and Risk

Institutional investor ownership has often been considered a corporate governance variable, typically used to proxy those investors’ ability to influence managers and to expropriate wealth from smaller shareholders. Large institutional investors have developed common holdings across numerous firms within industries. We consider the effects of institutional investor ownership with risk on the performance of banks and insurance companies. Using a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model with firm- and year-fixed effects, we find strong statistical relation between performance and individual firm’s ownership stakes by Blackrock and Fidelity. Moreover, we find a positive and statistically significant relation between performance and the percentage of the industry’s equity owned by the four organizations together. The findings suggest that some organizations like Blackrock are successful in obtaining long-term returns by exerting influence over the management of their invested firms, which is consistent with recent statements by the Blackrock CEO.

The Effects of Urbanization on Insurance Consumption—The experience of China

Cross‐country studies of insurance find little support for a hypothesized urbanization–insurance consumption link. Unlike the literature, we argue and find that the relationship is positive. Our study refines the literature relating economic development and financial service activities. The empirical evidence in the existing literature is based on cross‐country samples that are criticized as unrepresentative because they are disproportionately composed of highly developed economies and consequently have limited range in the variables considered; this limits confidence in the resulting evidence. The current study overcomes these empirical difficulties by focusing on one large country with a unique recent development pattern. Like the existing studies, we find a positive insurance-economic development link. In contrast to cross‐country studies, we find that insurance consumption is influenced by urbanization and that the countrys World Trade Organization entry had a differential impact on its insurance markets.