An important new dimension of the regulatory environment in banking and insurance is the explicit reliance on market discipline. Expectation: A transparent market will require less overt intervention by regulators (market participants themselves force appropriate behavior)...

In this paper, we investigate the German stock market with regard to negative stubvalues or parent company puzzles. These are situations where a firms marketvalue is less than the value of its ownership stake in a publicly traded subsidiary.According to MITCHELL/PULVINO/STAFFORD (2002), negative...

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...

In dieser Arbeit werden die systematischen Risiken von Distressed-Securities-Hedgefonds untersucht. Es finden sich vier Faktoren, die das systematische Risiko dieser Strategiegruppe weitgehend erklären: Das sind die Renditen zweier Optionsstrategien, (1.) einer Short-Put-Positionen auf einen...