Browsing by Author "Kleffner, Anne"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    An Investigation Of The United Nations Sendai Framework For Disaster Risk Reduction And Its Applicability To The Fort Chipewyan Community
    (2021-08) Fong, Meagan Elizabeth; Kleffner, Anne; Hosford, Claire
    Since disasters occur at a local level, it is important to assess community-based disaster risk management to ensure that the community can prevent and reduce new or existing risks. In response, the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (Sendai Framework) (2015-2030) was adopted to strengthen community resilience through disaster risk management. The research question that this project examines is: can the United Nations Sendai Framework build community resilience through improved disaster risk management, including climate change adaptation measures in Fort Chipewyan? This report will employ an extensive literature review to assess some of the environmental, technological, and man-made hazards in Fort Chipewyan, as well as provide a thorough description of lessons learned from the 2016 Horse River wildfire, and current policies, legislations, and regulations in place. This will allow the report to determine the benefits, and challenges to implementing the Sendai Framework within Fort Chipewyan’s emergency management programs.
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    Antecedents and Consequences of MBA Program Rankings
    (2024-09-13) Heggerud, Catherine Louise; Osiyevskyy, Oleksiy; Dewald, Jim; Jones, Vernon; Kleffner, Anne; Watson, Lisa
    The impact of MBA program rankings on business schools has been profound and multifaceted, influencing the strategic actions of deans and shaping the perceptions of various stakeholders. This thesis investigates the antecedents and consequences of these rankings through a comprehensive analysis comprising a case study and an empirical study. The case study delves into how Canadian business school deans make sense of and respond to rankings, as the rankings have been institutionalized within the business school ecosystem, revealing the paradoxes they navigate in their strategic decision-making processes. Employing sensemaking and sensegiving frameworks, the study highlights how rankings have become entrenched, creating tensions between deans' identities as academics and administrators. The empirical study examines the drivers of full-time MBA program rankings using a corporate reputational model. By analyzing publicly available data, the study identifies factors such as in-region competition and product differentiation that are positively connected to a program’s ranking. This dual approach not only uncovers the internal and external pressures faced by business schools but also provides actionable insights for deans aiming to enhance their programs’ standings. The findings contribute to the broader understanding of how rankings affect higher education institutions and offer practical implications for strategic management in business schools. This research underscores the complexity of navigating rankings and highlights the need for continuous adaptation and balanced strategic actions to maintain and improve MBA program rankings. This research extends our understanding of rankings as a reputational construct, opens avenues for longitudinal or cross-program studies, and has the potential to shape higher education administrative practice.
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    The Distribution of Property/Liability Insurance in Canada: Costs and Market Structure
    (Western Risk and Insurance Association, 2006) Kleffner, Anne; Kelly, Mary
    Studies in the U.S. show that insurers that operate as exclusive writers have lower expense ratios than agency writers. In addition, exclusive and commodity writers dominate personal lines of insurance and agency writers dominate commercial lines. In contrast, Canadian agency writers dominate both personal and commercial lines. Furthermore, in Canada, a firm's distribution method does not affect its relative expenses. We conjecture that the higher fixed costs faced by exclusive and commodity writers in Canada counterbalance the lower variable costs faced by these firms. The lack of dominance in personal lines by Canadian exclusive writers is a rational response to the smaller market size in Canada and the higher level of government intervention.
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    An Examination of Property & Casualty Insurer Solvency in Canada
    (Western Risk & Insurance Association (WRIA), 2009) Kleffner, Anne; Lee, Ryan B
    This paper provides both a qualitative and empirical analysis of insolvency experience in the Canadian property and casualty insurance industry. First, we provide a qualitative analysis of the differences between Canada and the U.S. that may help to explain the lower incidence of insolvency experience in Canada. These include differences in regulation and monitoring, such as the presence of a federal regulator and higher capital requirements, and differences in the environment, such as lower legal liability risk and less exposure to catastrophic risk. Second, we use logistic regression methodology and variables commonly used in U.S. studies of insurer insolvency prediction to test whether such models are able to predict insolvency for Canadian insurers. We include variables that attempt to capture some of the important differences between the Canadian and U.S. markets. The results suggest that only the profitability measure, return on assets, is found to be a statistically significant predictor of insolvency, and that result holds only one year prior to insolvency. This relationship is consistent with many previous studies on U.S. property and casualty insurer insolvency.
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    The impact of adjuster moral hazard on driving records
    (Society of Actuaries, 2009) Kleffner, Anne; Kelly, Mary; Isotuba, Sapna
    In a first-party recovery scheme for automobile property damage, the first-party insurer compensates not-at-fault vehicular damage. In this scheme, adjusters may not have the incentive to assign liability when the driver is, in fact, at fault for the accident. This is due to adjusters not having to coordinate with a third-party adjuster, and, for insureds that carry collision coverage, the assignment of fault does not appreciably affect the compensation paid out. This in turn reduces the effectiveness of the experience-rating component of the insurance premium. Empirical evidence that supports the presence of incorrect fault assignment is provided. A stochastic model of experience rating analyzing the impact of incorrect fault assignment on driving record classes confirms that low-risk insureds pay more for insurance than if fault was correctly assigned.
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    LONG-TERM LIABILITY FOR CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE IN DEPLETED NORTH AMERICAN OIL AND GAS RESERVOIRS A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
    (Energy Bar Association, 2010) Nielson, Norma; Ingelson, Allan; Kleffner, Anne
    State legislation in North America that addresses whether a government will accept long-term liability for damage arising from the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) after capture and storage (CCS) in depleted oil and gas reservoirs is in its infancy. Three states have developed legislation that conveys two different approaches to long-term liability. The federal governments in the United States and Canada have not developed legislation to address the issue. This article examines emerging legislative frameworks, in a limited number of jurisdictions, that have been adopted to manage long-term liability: viz., Wyoming, Kansas, Montana, the European Union (EU), and Australia. The majority of state governments to date, including Wyoming, Kansas, and the State of Victoria in Australia, are not prepared to assume long-term liability, while the EU and the State of Montana are prepared to proceed with a conditional transfer of liability from the CCS developer/operator to the government. We conclude that while a model that incorporates a conditional transfer of liability to a “pool,” such as in Montana and the EU, may encourage more investment in CCS, such a model does not incorporate the “polluter pays” principle. Arguably the incentive is greater to prevent future gas releases and thereby minimize the long-term risk to the public in jurisdictions such as Wyoming, Kansas, and the State of Victoria, where the CCS developer and/or operator retains long-term liability under the common law. As has been the practice in some jurisdictions in the North American petroleum industry, if the CCS developer/operator is either required to purchase and maintain third party liability insurance, or to post a bond or other form of security with the government for site remediation and reclamation, such an approach will help to minimize the long-term liability for the government and taxpayers. However, in the case of CCS, given the extraordinarily long duration of the risk associated with carbon storage, it is by no means certain that either insurance or bonds can be purchased for such an extended time period. We recommend a pooling approach to the management of remediation and reclamation funds based largely on arguments that it is more economically efficient to do so. While it would be theoretically possible for such a pool to be private, it is likely that the need for independent oversight will result in a governmental entity assuming the management function for such a liability/compensation scheme.
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    Perceived Risks of Energy Pipelines A Proposal for More Integrated Risk Management
    (2017) Ho Wai Wong, Bernard; Kleffner, Anne
    This project attempts to answer the following questions: ? Is there a risk perception gap regarding the safety of energy pipelines? ? How can the gap be closed if there is one? Research on perceived risks of pipelines is important because the public’s ris
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    The Relationship Between Automobile Liability Costs and Government Social Spending
    (HEC Montreal, 2011) Kleffner, Anne; Born, Patricia; Chan, David
    Liability insurance is one of the primary mechanisms for compensating individuals who are injured in auto accidents. An injured individual’s propensity to seek compensation through the legal system depends on his or her expected payoff and access to other sources of compensation. A justification for social insurance programs that provide compensation to injured parties is the potential for such compensation to reduce the need for victims to seek compensation through the legal system. If such programs serve as substitutes for the legal system as sources of compensation, then we expect that as spending on these programs decreases, liability costs will increase, and vice-versa. Using State-level data for the U.S., and provincial-level data for Canada, we evaluate the relationship between government health/welfare spending and automobile liability insurance costs. Our results suggest a small but significant substitute relationship in both countries. Information that substantiates a connection between these sources will be useful in public assistance decision-making.
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    The Impact of Industry Cycles on Strategic Management of Human Capital: Three Empirical Studies
    (2024-07-23) Wang, Ke; Sherer, Peter; Sherer, Peter; Anderson, Mark; Kwon, Seok-Woo; Kleffner, Anne; Dencker, John
    Research on strategic human capital management (HCM) has concentrated on firm outcomes such as performance and competitive advantage. However, there is less understanding regarding the determinants of firms’ strategic behaviors in HCM. While the influence of context on firm behaviors has been well documented in the management literature, it has been under-researched in the specific realm of strategic HCM. This dissertation addresses how industry cycles, an important market context, affect firms' management of existing human capital regarding the treatment of women employees, and firms’ acquisition of human capital through human-assets-embodied (HAE) acquisitions. By using multilevel and longitudinal analyses the three empirical studies in this dissertation found determining effects of industry cycles on firms’ strategic behaviors in HCM. The results of the first study indicate that firms manage their tendencies for gender discrimination regarding differential punishment–referred to as the gender punishment gap– during downturns by imposing low-visibility punishments (through pay freezes) rather than high-visibility punishments (through layoffs) on top female leaders to mitigate reputation loss. The second study confirms firms’ higher likelihood to promote women into leadership positions during downturns than upturns–the glass cliff phenomenon– but highlights firms’ strategic consideration that only women who are top performers experience increased promotion chances during downturns. The third study shows that firms make HAE acquisitions more in upturns than downturns to meet their strategic priorities and take advantage of the benefits from human capital embodied in acquisitions. By emphasizing the influential effects of context on firms’ strategic decision-making, the three studies explain why and when firms undertake certain HCM practices, thereby deepening our understanding of firms’ strategic behaviors in human capital management. Therefore, the dissertation complements existing research on strategic HCM, which focuses on the outcomes of HCM behaviors. It also contributes to management practice by sensitizing business decision-makers to the important role of industry cycles in HCM practices.