This paper documents that the bond investments of insurance companies transmit shocks from insurance markets to the real economy. Liquidity windfalls from household insurance purchases increase insurers' demand for corporate bonds. Exploiting the fact that insurers persistently invest in a small...

Common systemic risk measures focus on the instantaneous occurrence of triggering and systemic events. However, systemic events may also occur with a time-lag to the triggering event. To study this contagion period and the resulting persistence of institutions' systemic risk we develop and...

Life insurers massively sell savings contracts with surrender options which allow policyholders to withdraw a guaranteed amount before maturity. These options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Using data on German life insurers, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in...

This paper investigates the effects of a rise in interest rate and lapse risk of endowment life insurance policies on the liquidity and solvency of life insurers. We model the book and market value balance sheet of an average German life insurer, subject to both GAAP and Solvency II regulation,...

Different insurance activities exhibit different levels of persistence of shocks and volatility. For example, life insurance is typically more persistent but less volatile than non-life insurance. We examine how diversification among life, non-life insurance, and active reinsurance business...

This paper studies insurance demand for individuals with limited financial literacy. We propose uncertainty about insurance payouts, resulting from contract complexity, as a novel channel that affects decision-making of financially illiterate individuals. Then, a trade-off between second-order...

Through the lens of market participants' objective to minimize counterparty risk, we provide an explanation for the reluctance to clear derivative trades in the absence of a central clearing obligation. We develop a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and potential pitfalls with respect...

We prove the existence of an equilibrium in competitive markets with adverse selection in the sense of Miyazaki (1977), Wilson (1977), and Spence (1978) when the distribution of unobservable risk types is continuous. Our proof leverages the finite-type proof in Spence (1978) and a limiting...