This paper empirically investigates if insurers exhibited a flight home or flight to quality during the European sovereign debt crisis and other stages of the financial crisis. Our dataset consists of over sixty insurance companies, for which we separately observe trading behaviour and portfolio...

Private trade credit insurance - covering the risk of non-payment - plays an important role in facilitating domestic and international trade, especially within Europe. Due to lack of data, however, very little is known about the influence of shocks on the market for private trade credit...

This paper measures the 'blurring of distinctions' phenomenon in an innovative way, namely by means of a breakdown of the revenues of the 50 largest financial groups worldwide. These data show that the blurring of distinctions between financial intermediaries of different nationalities (i.e....

This paper investigates the cost efficiency and competitive behaviour of the non-life - or property and casualty - insurance market in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. We focus on the 2006 health care reform, where public health care insurance has been included in the non-life...

We analyse the effect of failing reinsurance cover on the stability of Dutch insurers. As insurers often reinsure themselves with other (re)insurers, losses could spread contagiously through the sector. Using a unique and confidential data set on reinsurance exposures, we perform a scenario...

We investigate the capital structure of 350 Dutch insurers during the period 1995-2005. Our main findings are: (1) a small company size, a mutual organisation, high profitability, large equity investments, and being a fire insurer, all contribute to higher solvency margins; (2) minimum solvency...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to-default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...

This paper investigates contagion of major financial institutions by focusing on extreme stock return co-movements. Our measure of contagion within banking and insurance sectors is the number of coincidences of daily extreme returns that cannot be explained by a linear propagation model of...

This paper discusses the method of comonotonicity to estimate the sum of risks. Two applications are presented. First, we estimate a property insurer.s exposure to claims after a severe storm. Second, we apply our approach to a pension fund.s investment risk to estimate the prospective total...

This paper investigates systemic risk in the Dutch financial sector by focusing on extreme returns of the major financial institutions. Our measure of systemic risk is the number of coincidences of extreme returns that cannot be explained by a linear model of constant correlation. By using a...