Amy W. Huber

Amy W. Huber
  • Assistant Professor of Finance

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    2320 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall
    3620 Locust Walk
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: Financial intermediation. Asset pricing. International finance. Macro-finance.

Links: CV, Personal Website

Overview

Amy W. Huber is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines how financial intermediation shapes asset market outcomes. She develops new frameworks and empirical measures to understand how the incentives and risk-bearing capacity of banks, FX dealers, private equity firms, and institutional investors influence asset prices and transmit shocks across markets.

Professor Huber holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an A.B. in Economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard College. Prior to joining academia, she worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in New York and as a private equity investor at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. She is also a CFA charterholder.

For the most up-to-date list of publications, working papers, and research activities, please visit her personal website.

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Research

  • Amy Huber, Stefan Huber, Jinqing Shan, Christina Zhu (Working), Buying from the Family: Private Equity-Owned Insurers and Their Affiliated Investments. Abstract

    Private equity (PE) firms increasingly own insurers as direct subsidiaries. This ownership places insurers within organizations that also originate, manage, and securitize credit assets. We study whether and on what terms insurers directly owned by PE firms provide financing to affiliated credit businesses. Using a novel dataset linking insurer ownership structures, transactions, holdings, and regulatory stress-test outcomes, we document three findings. First, PE-owned insurers provide substantial financing to affiliated credit businesses: 60.8% of their 2024 structured-security investments are issued by affiliated entities, compared to 1.7% for other insurers. Second, comparing purchases of the same security on the same day, PE-owned insurers pay systematically higher prices when buying from affiliated issuers, implying more favorable financing terms for those issuers. Third, affiliated investments offer higher promised yields but substantially greater downside risk under stress scenarios. We estimate that the overpayment corresponds to a financing subsidy of approximately $27 million per year for affiliated issuers, while the elevated risk profile would reduce insurer capital by 8.9 percentage points under a 2008 financial crisis stress scenario. Together, our results suggest that PE-owned insurers function as a captive source of capital for affiliated credit activities, raising concerns about policyholder protection and financial stability.

Teaching

Past Courses

  • FNCE7070 - Valuation

    The focus of this course is on the valuation of companies. The course covers current conceptual and theoretical valuation frameworks and translates those frameworks into practical approaches for valuing companies. The relevant accounting topics and the appropriate finance theory are integrated to show how to implement the valuation frameworks discussed on a step-by-step basis. The course teaches how to develop the required information for valuing companies from financial statements and other information sources in a real-world setting. Topics covered in depth include discounted cash flow techniques and price multiples. In addition, the course covers other valuation techniques such as leveraged buyout analysis.

  • FNCE9330 - International Finance

    To provide an understanding of selected topics of current academic research in the areas of international finance and its intersection with international macroeconomics; to teach interested students the tools for conducting research in this field. Each topic will be developed beginning with early classic papers and then updated through the current status of the profession. The typical target audience comprises students in their second year or later. Prerequisite: Completion of first year course requirements

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Activity

Latest Research

Amy Huber, Stefan Huber, Jinqing Shan, Christina Zhu (Working), Buying from the Family: Private Equity-Owned Insurers and Their Affiliated Investments.
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In the News

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