ALBERT

Description: India is home to over one-third of all undernourished children worldwide, and it ranks 94th out of 107 nations in the Global Hunger Index 2020. Instability in production and market risks make agriculture a risky business and directly affect farmers’ income levels, thereby impacting food security. This review aimed to understand various features of different crop insurance policies in India and to analyze the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana’s (PMFBY) impacts on Indian farmers. A literature search was performed in all popular databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest, AGRICOLA, AGRIS, and Google search engines, as well as annual Indian government reports. The keywords “Crop Insurance” OR “Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana” OR “National Agriculture Schemes” AND “India” were searched to obtain relevant articles. By using cumulative data, we conducted a multiple regression analysis and a model was developed to estimate the effects of insurance characteristics on farmer coverage for the years 2017–2018 and 2018–2019. Agricultural insurance coverage under PMFBY remained low in terms of the number of farmers insured, the area insured, claims paid, and total farmers benefited. Compared to other schemes, the beneficiary and claim premium ratios were substantially lower under the PMFBY. The multiple regression analysis showed that farmers’ premiums have a significant effect on the number of farmers insured over time, although the subsidies do not have a significant influence in farmers’ insurance participation. Delays in claim settlement, the complexity of the system, and a lack of awareness among farmers are the major weaknesses of the PMFBY. Greater use of digital media could help spread awareness of these schemes among farmers.

Description: Ιmplicit pension debt is attracting increasing attention worldwide as a driver of fiscal dynamics, operating in parallel to the (explicit) National Debt. A prudent examination of a state’s fiscal prospects should ideally encompass both, with due attention paid to the special features of each kind of debt. The explosion of government deficits as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic only adds to the urgency of understanding the scale and nature of issues around accounting for contingent liabilities. The reports of the EU Ageing working group, produced and published every three years are used to derive estimates of the stock of outstanding implicit pension debt from flows of projected deficits. This can be performed for all European member states. This paper uses the last two rounds of the Ageing Report (2021, 2018) and derives conclusions on the evolution of pension debt and its correlation to the external debt. The paper concludes that producing comparable estimates of IPD should become an important input in EU policy discussion.

Description: We consider annuity designs in which the benefit amount is allowed to fluctuate (up or down), based on a given mortality/longevity experience. This way, guarantees are relaxed in respect of traditional annuity arrangements. On the other hand, while the annuitant is exposed to the risk of a future reduction of the benefit amount because of higher longevity, he/she can immediately take advantage of a lower premium loading, as well as of a future increase of the benefit amount in the case of higher mortality. Flexibility in the annuity design could be welcomed by individuals, as the conservative features of traditional products partly explain their lack of attractiveness in most markets. To further contribute to the flexibility of the product, we suggest a pricing structure based on periodic fees applied to the policy fund, instead of the usual upfront loading at issue. Periodic fees are more suitable to support a revision of the arrangement after issue, which is currently not allowed in traditional annuity products. We show that periodic fees can be introduced by identifying a discount factor to be used for pricing and reserving. We assume stochastic mortality, and we compare alternative mortality/longevity linking solutions, by assessing the periodic fees and other quantities.

Description: The key to understanding the dynamics of stock markets, particularly the mechanisms of their changes, is in the concept of the market regime. It is regarded as a regular transition from one state to another. Although the market agenda is never the same, its functioning regime allows us to reveal the logic of its development. The article employs the concept of financial turbulence to identify hidden market regimes. These are revealed through the ratio of the components, which describe single changes of correlated risks and volatility. The combinations of typical and atypical variates of correlational and magnitude components of financial turbulence allowed four hidden regimes to be revealed. These were arranged by the degree of financial turbulence, conceptually analyzed and assessed from the perspective of their duration. The empirical data demonstrated ETF day trading profits for S&P 500 sectors, covering the period of January 1998–August 2020, as well as day trade profits of the Russian blue chips within the period of October 2006–February 2021. The results show a significant difference in regard to the market performance and volatility, which depend on hidden regimes. Both sample data groups demonstrated similar contemporaneous and lagged effects, which allows the prediction of volatility jumps in the periods following atypical correlations.

Description: In the era of a turbulent and less-predictable business environment, as confirmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to efficiently use human resources has become particularly important. There is a need to reduce employees' competency niche, and competency mismatches have become noticeable in the European Union. We performed qualitative interviews (n = 282) to determine the competency niche of employees from private firms in Poland. Results show that employees were passive in identifying their competence needs. Moreover, firms did not use the weak signals methodology to eliminate the competency niche. This novel study found that firms should be more active in identifying employee competency niches by analyzing early signs to be ready for any changes without delays. The findings create a basis for proposing preventive measures, and we point out avenues for future research.

Description: This exploratory study aims to understand why, and propose remedies for, the treatment of political risk and sustainability as siloed risk areas in risk analyses. I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that focuses on the roles of values and worldviews, stages of sustainability and hybrid knowledge to understand this siloing. The large-N interpretive method used here combines content frequency counts with discourse analysis to examine over 400 corporate communication documents from 37 companies. The study also explores how, through corporate communication, companies that provide political risk analysis convey what is at risk and what counts as sustainability. I argue that the broad shared ‘cultural’ tones of what it means to be in the political risk field pose challenges for integrating political risk and sustainability. The study concludes with several recommendations on how to overcome the current barriers in order to integrate political risk and sustainability in risk analyses.

Description: In the view of the current discussion on how to regulate the emerging InsurTech companies, if at all, the author attempts to demonstrate that rather than automatically introducing new regulation, the principle of proportionality can, in most cases, help to adapt application of the existing rules and policy approaches to the InsurTech business models without incurring major regulatory changes. An example of peer-to-peer platforms is used to show how the specificity of each InsurTech company can be grasped by the three key criteria of proportionality: nature, scale and complexity.

Description: The aim of this paper is to deepen the application of value at risk in the cyber domain, with particular attention to its potential role in security investment valuation. Cyber risk is a fundamental component of the overall risk faced by any organization. In order to plan the size of security investments and to estimate the consequent risk reduction, managers strongly need to quantify it. Accordingly, they can decide about the possibility of sharing residual risk with a third party, such as an insurance company. Recently, cyber risk management techniques are including some risk quantile-based measures that are widely employed in the financial domain. They refer to value at risk that, in the cyber context, takes the name of cyber value at risk (Cy-VaR). In this paper, the main features and challenging issues of Cy-VaR are examined. The possible use of this risk measure in supporting investment decisions in cyber context is discussed, and new risk-based security metrics are proposed. Some simple examples are given to show their potential.

Description: The main task of the article is to examine the impact of the reported impairment of assets (IoA) on the market reaction of investors on the Warsaw Stock Exchange [WSE] in the crisis condition caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a need to verify whether the disclosure of this information in the period of economic downturn will cause a similar negative reaction as in previous topics in this area. Research undertaken in this article helps identify the rules of behaviour (in the short term) whether the reaction of investors on updating the company’s assets in crisis conditions is different than in times of prosperity. The main hypothesis will be verified using the event study methodology. It allows to verify whether the upcoming information about IoA during the COVID-19 pandemic confirms an existence of statistically significant negative abnormal returns. Based on the 55 cases of current reports informing about IoA, which were submitted to the investors in the year 2020 and finally qualified for the research sample, I have not observed statistically significant negative abnormal returns on the adjacent days. The results are different from those obtained by researchers who study the market reaction to the IoA under non-crisis conditions of the economy.

Description: Effective acquisition of funds, including European Union (EU) funds, designated for example, creating economic and social processes, may have a real impact on the elimination of the negative outcomes of the current position of the EU on the global scale. The aim of the research is to indicate the impact of spending funds from the Regional Operational Program of the Opolskie Voivodeship 2014–2020 (ROP OV) on a key macroeconomic area of the economy, i.e., the housing development sector in the region. The practical aim is to formulate recommendations and solutions that can offer guidelines for more effective spending of EU funds and their effect on the macroeconomic dimensions of the economy. The article proposes an innovative approach to linking EU payments in the region with the real estate market. The results of the research and the analyses made on this basis showed a positive impact of the payments made from the ROP OV on selected macroeconomic indicators, i.e., the number of permits issued for the construction of new apartments and the number of currently implemented housing investments. The obtained results should be used in the decision-making process at the level of regional and national authorities responsible for the payment of EU funds. In this article, prior to the research process, a literature review was made. It covered various aspects of the evolution and development of research in the area of regional development. The research process was based on innovative methods of time variability analysis, correlation between the investigated determinants and coherence analysis for the studied dimensions. Data on payments from the ROP OV concern the years 2015–2020.