The financial services industry has undergone significant regulatory change in thepast two decades due to Basel II (banking) and Solvency II (insurance). Even though these promulgations are focused on European institutions, their influenceextends around the globe. An important dimension of this...

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...

In this paper, we first discuss the characteristics and major benefits of the Swissrisk-based capital standards for insurance companies (Swiss Solvency Test), introduced in 2006. As the insurance industry is one of the largest institutional investors in Switzerland, changes to its asset and...

It is frequently noted that investment funds with a nonnormal return distributioncannot be adequately evaluated using the classic Sharpe ratio. However, recent research compared the Sharpe ratio with other performance measures and found virtually identical rank ordering using hedge fund data. We...

The aim of this paper is to develop an alternative approach for assessing an insurer’s solvency as a proposal for a standard model for Solvency II. Instead ofderiving minimum capital requirements—as it is done in solvency regulation—our model provides company-specific minimum standards for...

Die Dynamische Finanzanalyse (DFA) hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren zu einemwichtigen Instrument zur Analyse der Finanzlage eines Versicherungsunternehmens entwickelt.Trotz der zunehmenden Verbreitung der DFA in der Praxis und zahlreicher Abhandlungenin der wissenschaftlichen Literatur gibt es...

In diesem Beitrag wird mit dem Swiss Solvency Test (SST) ein mögliches Referenzmodellfür die Ausgestaltung von Solvency II vorgestellt. Der SST wurde vomschweizerischen Bundesamt für Privatversicherungen entwickelt und zu Beginn desJahres 2006 für grosse Lebens- und Schadenversicherer...

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of nonlinear dependencies on a nonlifeinsurers risk and return profile. To achieve this, we integrate several copulamodels in a dynamic financial analysis (DFA) framework and conduct numericaltests within a simulation study. We also test several...