One of the most contentious issues raised during the recent crisis has been the potentially exacerbating role played by mark-to-market accounting. Many have proposed the use of historical cost accounting, promoting its ability to avoid the amplification of systemic risk. We caution against...

This paper focuses on the impact of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) and of their regulation on the post-crisis transformation of securities and derivatives markets. It examines, in particular, the role that trading and post-trading FMIs, and their new regulatory regime, are playing in...

Current approaches to asset-liability management employ a sequence of distinct procedures to value liabilities and determine the asset allocation. First, a discount rate that is usually dic-tated by accounting standards is used to value liabilities. Second, the asset allocation is determined by...

Multi-year insurance has been proposed as a tool to incentivise policy-holders to invest in property-level adaptation. In a world of rising natural catastrophe risks, such autonomous adaptations could have significant benefits for the property owner, the insurer and society. We review some...

We investigate the effects of regulatory restrictions on the amounts invested in risky asset classes in life insurance funds across EU countries. By estimating a panel data econometric model, we find that these restrictions have an economically and statistically significant negative impact on...

Climate change adaptation is an increasingly important field and will involve a range of actors from national governments to private companies, communities and households. There is a growing policy discourse supporting the involvement of the private sector in adaptation, however there is little...

Extreme weather events represent the earliest, and in some places most significant, threats to the most vulnerable countries that are driven by climate change. An outcome of the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change...

Background Although most community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes are voluntary, problem of adverse selection is hardly studied. Evidence on the impact of targeted subsidies on adverse selection is completely missing. This paper investigates adverse selection in a CBHI scheme in Burkina...

This paper tests the presence of multiple independent submarkets in the Italian motor insurance industry. Independence is motivated by administrative boundaries among provinces and by further locational reasons. We find that the independence effects are sufficient to induce a minimum degree of...