With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on pension insurance systems. The financial literature tends to focus exclusively on the US pension insurance system. This is the first major empirical study to address the German occupational pension insurance (PSVaG) plan in Germany. The...

Since the early 1990s an unprecedented process of consolidation has taken place in the banking sector in most industrialised countries raising concern of policymakers that it may reduce access to credit for the small business sector. While most of the existing empirical studies have focused on...

In this paper, we use detailed data on the sovereign debt holdings of all German banks to analyse the determinants of sovereign debt exposures and the implications of sovereign exposures for bank risk. Our main findings are as follows. First, sovereign bond holdings are heterogeneous across...

This paper adds to the growing body of literature on the design of Contingent Convertible Bonds (CoCos). We discuss how the design of the loss absorption mechanism affects the stability of bank funding and distinguish between Conversion-to-Equity (CE) CoCos, Principal WriteDown (PWD) CoCos with...

In this paper, we present a new approach to measuring interest rate risk for insurers within the Swiss Solvency Test, which overcomes the shortcomings of the standard model. The standard model of the Swiss Solvency Test is based on more interest rate risk factors than are actually needed to...

Life insurance companies are affected directly by the impact of the low-interestrate environment. To fulfil promised guarantees they may be forced to tap into their own funds, say if the current income generated is no longer sufficient to cover the policyholders' profit participation share as...

Die Lebensversicherer sind von den Auswirkungen des Niedrigzinsumfelds unmittelbar betroffen. Damit sie die zugesicherten Garantien erfüllen können, müssen sie unter Umständen Eigenmittel aufwenden. Dies ist dann der Fall, wenn die von den Unternehmen festgelegte Überschussbeteiligung oder...

In this paper, we report a descriptive investigation of the structural evolution of two of the most important over-the-counter markets for liquidity in Germany: the interbank market for credit and for derivatives. We use end-of-quarter data from the German large credit register between 2002 and...

We study differences in the price paid for liquidity across banks using price data at the individual bank level. Unique to this paper, we also have data on individual banks' reserve requirements and actual reserve holdings, thus allowing us to gauge the extent to which a bank is short or long...

We study the liquidity allocation among European banks around the Lehman insolvency using a novel dataset of all interbank loans settled via the Eurosystem's payment system TARGET2. Following the Lehman insolvency, lenders in the overnight segment become sensitive to counterparty characteristics...