A low interest rate environment can pose a key risk to the life insurance sector. A deteriorating return on investment holdings jeopardizes the guaranteed return on life insurance contracts. In this paper, we examine the effect of low interest rates on German life insurers by applying various...

Based on a theoretical model featuring heterogeneous retailers that may source globally and operate as chains, we derive a number of hypotheses that link trade integration to retail firm performance and to the structure of retail markets. We empirically test these predictions using Danish...

We study the response of bond spreads to a liquidity supply shock in the credit default swap (CDS) market. Our identification strategy exploits the exogenous exit of a large dealer from the single-name CDS market as well as granular data on CDS transactions and bond portfolio holdings of German...

This paper deals with stress tests for credit risk and shows how exploiting the discretion when setting up and implementing a model can drive the results of a quantitative stress test for default probabilities. For this purpose, we employ several variations of a CreditPortfolioView-style model...

Multi-agency financial stability committees (FSCs) have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis. However, most cannot direct actions or recommend to other agencies that they take actions, and most would influence policy actions only through convening and discussing risks. We...

This paper tests whether an increase or decrease of the capital surcharge for being a global systemically important bank (G-SIB) envisaged by regulators has an impact on the CDS prices of these banks. We find evidence that the CDS spreads of a G-SIB bank increase (decrease) after the...

We introduce a novel simulation-based network approach, which provides full-edged distributions of potential interbank losses. Based on those distributions we propose measures for (i) systemic importance of single banks, (ii) vulnerability of single banks, and (iii) vulnerability of the whole...