Financial Institutions

We examine economic consequences of US bank regulators' phased removal of the prudential filter for accumulated other comprehensive income for advanced approaches banks beginning on January 1, 2014. The primary effect of the AOCI filter is to exclude unrealized gains and losses on available-for-sale securities from banks' regulatory capital.

We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments as they lower the insurer's liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raise future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector's aggregate benefit from FDA approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year.

We find that an increase in the "unusualness" of news with negative sentiment predicts an increase in stock market volatility. Similarly, unusual positive news forecasts lower volatility. Our analysis is based on more than 360,000 articles on 50 large financial companies, published in 1996–2014. Unusualness interacted with sentiment forecasts volatility at both the company-specific and aggregate level. These effects persist for several months. Furthermore, unusual news is reflected in volatility more slowly at the aggregate than at the company-specific level.

We study the association between human capital and rollovers into Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), using administrative records from the defined contribution savings plan for U.S. government employees: the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Employees who separate from government employment have the option to leave balances in the TSP, where fees are currently under 4 basis points. However, we estimate that more than a third of the TSP balances end up being rolled over into IRA accounts, which are very likely to have much higher fees.

Corporate support has not kept pace with realities of family life.

The psycho-cultural barriers women face are hard to overcome because they are not obvious.