The risk of infrastructure firms is driven by unique factors that cannot be well described by standard asset class factor models. We thus create a seven-factor model based on infrastructure-specific risk exposure, i.e., market risk, cash flow volatility, leverage, investment growth, term risk,...

The intention of this paper is to review research on lapse in life insurance and to outline potential new areas of research in this field. We consider theoretical lapse rate models as well as empirical research on life insurance lapse and provide a classification of these two streams of...

The purpose of this article is to structure the extant knowledge on the determinants of microinsurance demand and to discuss unresolved questions that deserve future research. To achieve this outcome, we review the academic literature on microinsurance demand published between 2000 and early...

This paper analyzes the equity risk module of Solvency II, the new regulatory framework in the European Union. The equity risk module contains a symmetric adjustment mechanism called equity dampener which shall reduce procyclicality of capital requirements and thus systemic risk in the insurance...

Regulation of any market can either promote or impede its development, thus affecting social welfare. In this paper, we are concerned with the impact of regulation in microinsurance markets. We evaluate existing and potential regulatory mechanisms with regard to its underlying economic...

We compare cliquet-style interest rate guarantees used in German participating life insurance contracts across different economic environments. These guarantees are proportional to the average market interest rate at contract inception and typically determined as 60 percent of the 10-year...

This paper reviews the extant research on systemic risk in the insurance sector and outlines potential new areas of research in this field. We summarize 30 theoretical and empirical research papers from both academia and practitioner organizations and provide a classification of existing...

Long-term health insurance contracts provide policyholders with the option of lapsing coverage or switching to another tariff within the same insurance company. We empirically analyze policyholder behavior regarding contract commitment in a large dataset of German private health insurance...

We empirically analyze the costs and benefits of financial regulation based on a survey of 76 insurers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Our analysis includes both established and new empirical measures for regulatory costs and benefits. This is the first paper that tries to take costs and...

Using state-of-the-art frontier efficiency methodologies, we study the efficiency and productivity of Swiss insurance companies in the life, property/casualty, and reinsurance sectors from 1997–2013. The broad scope of this study provides an opportunity to compare and cross-check the findings...