NEWSLETTER of March 18, 2022

The following content has been added at finexpert:

Oliver Wyman
FINANCIAL HOME: WIE VERSICHERER IHRE KUNDENBEZIEHUNGEN VERTIEFEN KÖNNEN
In private money matters, many households are in disarray, with numerous service providers vying in parallel for access and customer loyalty. Many consumers want a so-called "financial home" - a central platform through which they can manage all their personal financial affairs. This is shown by our analysis in collaboration with the InsurTech Hub Munich, one of the twelve "Digital Hubs" in Germany funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection. >more

Credit Suisse
GLOBAL INVESTMENT RETURNS YEARBOOK 2022
This is an extract of the Yearbook 2022, produced in collaboration with the CSRI by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton. This year's edition focuses on diversification as a special topic and offers an extended dataset by adding three new markets. The full version is available on CS PLUS for clients of the bank and in hard copy upon request. >more

I-Advise
STUDIE ZUR UNTERNEHMENSBEWERTUNG BEI GESELLSCHAFTSRECHTLICHEN BEWERTUNGSANLÄSSEN
The eighth edition of the study on company valuations in corporate law valuation situations shows the development of valuation practice for squeeze-outs, domination and profit and loss transfer agreements, mergers and changes of legal form in the years 2010 to 2021. With 44% of all squeeze-out measures, the share of squeeze-outs under merger law reached its peak in 2021. >more

State Street
WHAT’S DRIVING ASSET MANAGER AND OWNER DEMAND FOR PRIVATE MARKETS?
The low-interest rate environment in place since the Global Financial Crisis has changed investors’ relationships with public markets and the COVID-19 pandemic has only added uncertainty and contributed to higher volatility. These conditions have driven considerable institutional investor interest in private markets in recent years, and many have sought new asset classes to enhance their portfolios vacated by overvalued public assets. >more

THE CROSS-SECTION OF GLOBAL CORPORATE BOND RETURNS
Marlena I. Lee, Savina Rizova, and Samuel Yusun Wang
2022
Forward rates contain reliable information about cross-sectional differences in expected global corporate bond returns. Many alternative bond-level and issuer-level variables, by contrast, are not reliably linked to expected bond returns or provide information about expected bond returns only through their correlation with forward rates. An exception is the issuer's prior short-term equity return. Short-term equity returns are negatively related to subsequent yield changes for the issuer's bonds in cross-sectional regressions, consistent with our finding that short-term equity returns are positively related to subsequent differences in bond returns even after controlling for forward rates. While the information in forward rates about differences in corporate bond returns tends to last for over a year, the information in short-term equity returns decays fast. >more

EMPLOYEE HEALTH AND FIRM PERFORMANCE
Daniel A. Rettl, Alexander Schandlbauer, and Mircea Trandafir
2022
When workers are in bad health, their productivity declines. We investigate whether the health of employees affects firm performance, taking advantage of the severity of the seasonal influenza seasons as a source of exogenous variation. We find that firms whose employees are particularly affected by influenza experience reductions in their return on assets and in net income. These results are not driven by firm-specific characteristics, as we find the same relationship between influenza severity and firm performance within firms, at the establishment level. We also document substantial heterogeneity in the effects, with small firms and labor-intensive firms driving our findings. This suggests that labor is an important driver of firm performance and that capital-intensive and larger firms are better able to shift resources in response to temporary shocks to their workforce. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that smaller firms may be better off subsidizing vaccination programs for their employees. >more