Portfolio rebalancing behavior with operating losses and investment regulation

Firms should make every attempt to reduce their tax burden by, for instance, preferring higher-yield taxable investments when faced with operating losses and lower-yield tax-exempt investments otherwise. We examine in this paper whether there are impediments to rebalancing which result from a firm's regulatory environment. Using an original measure of investment regulatory stringency that U.S. property and casualty insurers encounter, we find that insurers operating in more stringent regulatory environments receive a lower percentage of their investment income from taxable sources. We conclude that regulatory constraints limit insurers from rebalancing efficiently their investment portfolio in response to operational performance.