In crisis times, insurance companies might feel the pressure to present an investment portfolio performance that is superior to the market, since investment portfolios back the claims of policyholders and serve as a signal for the claims' safety. I investigate how a stock market crisis as...

We document a novel transmission channel of monetary policy through the homeowners insurance market. On average, contractionary monetary policy shocks result in higher homeowners insurance prices. Using granular data on insurers' balance sheets, we show that this effect is driven by the...

The European insurance industry is awaiting the new EU-wide harmonized Solvency II framework. Before its introduction, it is important to find out which incentive effects can arise from it. Practitioners predict a trend towards consolidation in the insurance sector due to recognition of...

Insurance guarantee schemes aim to protect policyholders from the costs of insurer insolvencies. However, guarantee schemes can also reduce insurers' incentives to conduct appropriate risk management. We investigate stock insurers' risk-shifting behavior for insurance guarantee schemes under the...

Low interest rates are becoming a threat to the stability of the life insurance industry, especially in countries such as Germany, where products with relatively high guaranteed returns sold in the past still represent a prominent share of the total portfolio. This contribution aims to assess...

Insurance regulation is typically aimed at policyholder protection. In particular, regulators attempt to ensure the financial "safety" of insurance firms, for example, by means of capital regulation, and to enhance the "affordability" of insurance, for example, by means of price ceilings....

The standard formula of the Solvency II framework employs an approximate value-at-risk approach to define risk-based capital requirements. The parameterization of the standard formula determines how much additional capital insurers need in order to back investments in risky assets. This paper...

This paper empirically studies the impact of consumer reaction to default risk on an insurer's optimal solvency level. Using experimentally obtained data, we derive a price-default risk-demand-curve that serves as an input variable for the insurer's risk strategy. We show that an insurer should...

This paper compares the shareholder-value-maximizing capital structure and pricing policy of insurance groups against that of stand-alone insurers. Groups can utilise intra-group risk diversification by means of capital and risk transfer instruments. We show that using these instruments enables...

This paper analyzes how capital-related frictional costs (e.g., corporate or personal taxes) influence insurers' optimal pricing and safety level decisions. Frictional costs are modeled with an innovative generic approach that is compatible with many realistic forms of taxation. I show that in...