Many institutional investors depend on the returns they generate to fund their operations and liabilities. How do these investors' financial conditions affect the management of their portfolios? We address this issue using the insurance industry because insurers are large investors for which...

With a sample of twelve US bond indices spanning different maturities, credit ratings and industry sectors, we investigate the impact of new bank capital regulation for trading portfolios introduced by Basel III. Specifically, we estimate the new capital requirements for (a) liquidity risk and...

Mutual insurance companies and stock insurance companies are different forms of organized risk sharing: policyholders and owners are two distinct groups in a stock insurer, while they are one and the same in a mutual. This distinction is relevant to raising capital, selling policies, and sharing...

Motivated by a recent demographic study establishing a link between macroeconomic fluctuations and the mortality index kt in the Lee-Carter model, we assess the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the solvency of a life insurance company. Liabilities in our stochastic simulation framework...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to- default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...

Das Eingehen von Pensionsverpflichtungen ist für Unternehmen mit vielfältigen Risiken verbunden. In diesem Papier werden am Beispiel der Pensionszusage die Auswirkungen zweier Risikofaktoren auf die Pensionsrückstellungen von Unternehmen untersucht: Des vorzeitigen Rentenbezugs und des für...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to- default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...

Das Eingehen von Pensionsverpflichtungen ist für Unternehmen mit vielfältigen Risiken verbunden. In diesem Papier werden am Beispiel der Pensionszusage die Auswirkungen zweier Risikofaktoren auf die Pensionsrückstellungen von Unternehmen untersucht: Des vorzeitigen Rentenbezugs und des für...

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these securitizations. Using micro-data on...

The Liikanen Group proposes contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds as a potential mechanism to enhance financial stability in the banking industry. Especially life insurance companies could serve as CoCo bond holders as they are already the largest purchasers of bank bonds in Europe. We develop a...