Purpose – Definitions of pooling effects in insurance companies may convey the impression that the achieved risk reduction effect will be beneficial for policyholders, since typically lower premiums are paid for the same safety level with an increasing number of insureds, or a higher safety...

Interest rate guarantees in unit-linked life insurance products ensure that at contract maturity, at least a minimum guaranteed amount is paid, even if the mutual fund falls below the guaranteed level. Strongly depending on the riskiness of the underlying mutual fund, these guarantees can be of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of industry loss warranties (ILWs), an alternative risk transfer instrument which has become increasingly popular throughout the last few years. Design/methodology/approach – The authors first point out key characteristics...

The aim of this paper is to develop an alternative approach for assessing an insurer's solvency as a proposal for a standard model for Solvency II. Instead of deriving minimum capital requirements-as is done in solvency regulation-our model provides company-specific minimum standards for risk...

A change in the corporate tax level can have a significant impact on rate making and capital structure for insurance companies. The purpose of this paper is to study this effect on competitive equity-premium combinations for different asset and liability models while retaining a fixed safety...

The aim of this article is to identify fair equity-premium combinations for non-life insurers that satisfy solvency capital requirements imposed by regulatory authorities. In particular, we compare target capital derived using the value at risk concept as planned for Solvency II in the European...

In this paper, we first discuss the characteristics and major benefits of the Swiss risk-based capital standards for insurance companies (Swiss Solvency Test), introduced in 2006. As the insurance industry is one of the largest institutional investors in Switzerland, changes to its asset and...