Religiosity may impact firm risk taking via its risk averse employees or through risk-sensitive demand. Using detailed financial statements of property-liability insurance companies, we find that both religiosity at firms' headquarters and the religiosity of firms' largest geographic market are negatively related to firm risk taking. For firms with one salient market, the impact of market religiosity is approximately the same order of magnitude as headquarter religiosity. Our evidence suggests that firm risk taking is influenced by customer demand.

The authors develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival, with an emphasis on the intraday flows. The measure is the number of news releases by Reuter's News Service per unit of time. The authors find that public information arrival is nonconstant, displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns. Next they relate their measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity. The authors' results suggest a positive, moderate relationship between public information and trading volume but an insignificant relationship with price volatility.

We develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival, with an emphasis on the intraday flows. The measure is the number of news releases by Reuter's News Service per unit of time. We find that public information arrival is nonconstant, displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns. Next we relate our measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity. Our results suggest a positive, moderate relationship between public information and trading volume, but an insignificant relationship with price volatility.

We develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival, with an emphasis on the intraday flows. The measure is the number of news releases by Reuter's News Service per unit of time. We find that public information arrival is nonconstant, displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns. Next we relate our measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity. Our results suggest a positive, moderate relationship between public information and trading volume, but an insignificant relationship with price volatility.

As financial markets become more global, the question arises whether any country specific considerations are still relevant for insurance companies’ capital structure. This research examines this question with firm-level data across a broad range of countries including those in developing markets. What we find is that the optimal capital structure of insurance companies is not homogeneous across countries. We find that country-level factors explain a substantial fraction of the cross-sectional variation in insurance companies’ capitalization levels. Our results add to the current policy discussion on global regulatory capital requirements. If insurer capital structure is not homogeneous across countries, a global capital standard – if desired – should take differences in the institutional environments across countries into account to avoid market distortions.