This paper analyzes price competition in the German motor insurance market since 1994 and looks for evidence to back up a claim frequently found in the trade literature—that there have been two recent price wars in this industry, the first in 1996–1999, the second in 2005–2006. In a first...

This article provides an overview and comparison of risk-based capital (RBC) requirements as they currently exist in the United States, the European Union, Switzerland, and New Zealand. These four systems are representative of different ways capital standards are implemented around the globe....

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and new empirical evidence on frontier effi-ciency measurement in the insurance industry, a topic of great interest in the academic literature during the last several years. In the first step, we review 87 studies and put them into a joint...

The purpose of this article is a qualitative economic impact assessment of the SolvencyII proposals. In a first step, we elaborate the economic foundations of insurancemarket regulation. Based on three sources of market failure, we derive economicobjectives of regulatory intervention. In our...

Die seit nunmehr 20 Jahren geführte gesellschaftspolitische Debatte zum Konzept desShareholder-Value ist vor allem auch durch eine unklare Belegung und Abgrenzung derverwendeten betriebswirtschaftlichen Begriffe gekennzeichnet. Im vorliegenden Beitragwird in einem ersten Schritt eine formale...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of different asset management and surplus distributionstrategies in life insurance on risk-neutral pricing and shortfall risk. In general,these feedback mechanisms affect the contract’s payoff and hence directly influence pricingand risk measurement. To...

Fundamental changes in the market environment force insurance intermediaries to redefinetheir roles. This article focuses on the future functions of brokers, which areanalyzed from a functional as well as a customer-oriented perspective. To cope withthe limitations of current intermediation...

Fair pricing of embedded options in life insurance contracts is usually conducted by using risk-neutral valuation. This pricing framework assumes a perfect hedging strategy, which insurance companies can hardly pursue in practice. In this paper, we extend the risk-neutral valuation concept with...

In comparing an immediate life annuity with a payout-equivalent investment fundpayout plan (self-annuitization), research to date has focused mainly on shortfallprobabilities of self-annuitization. As an exception, Schmeiser and Post (2005)propose a family strategy where the chances of...

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) models an insurance company’s cash flow inorder to forecast assets, liabilities, and ruin probabilities, as well as full balancesheets for different scenarios. In the last years DFA has become an important toolfor the analysis of an insurance company’s...