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 is the first that formally compares investment risk taking by pension funds and insurance firms. Using a unique and extended dataset that covers the volatile investment period 1995-2009, we find that, in the Netherlands, insurers take substantially less investment risk than pension...

Financial conglomerates, combining banking, securities trading, and insurance, have become an important part of the financial landscape in many countries. Cross-sector consolidation has been fostered by trends such as disintermediation, globalization, and deregulation creating new challenges for...

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 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...

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...

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...