The financial meltdown that began in 2007 revealed problems with the financial guarantee insurers and regulation of these insurers. Financial guarantee insurers, with business models dependent on AAA-credit ratings, were exposed to risks that threatened those ratings. These insurers had four...

Life insurers' odds of being placed under regulatory control (for example, conservatorship or receivership) during the financial crisis years of 2008 and 2009 increased with deteriorating fundamentals at a much higher rate than during normal times or during the previous recession. However, no...

Shadow insurance is a regulatory loophole exploited by certain insurance groups to increase risk exposure, potentially destabilizing the financial system. In this paper, we evaluate the contribution of shadow insurance to systemic risk of the global financial sector using a sample of 215...

We propose that financial institutions can act as asset insulators, holding assets for the long run to protect their valuations from consequences of exposure to financial markets. We illustrate the empirical relevance of this theory for the balance sheet behavior of a large class of...

We reexamine life insurance and annuity pricing during the 2008 financial crisis. In contrastwith previous research, we find that insurers sold policies at significantly elevated markups overtheir fundamental values during the crisis months and, moreover, that statutory accountingpressures had...

Life insurers' odds of being placed under regulatory control (for example, conservatorship or receivership) during the financial crisis years of 2008 and 2009 increased with deteriorating fundamentals at a much higher rate than during normal times or during the previous recession. However, no...

Banks and other financial institutions which were too-big-to-fail (TBTF) played a central role during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. The present article lays out how misguided policies enabled banks to grow both in size as well as in complexity and therefore acquire TBTF status,...

Most of the blame for the present Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been attributed to securitization and CDSs in the years preceding growth of the crisis. On reflection, most of the blame must be “sheeted home” to the former U.S government's mandate to banks and other financial institutions...

In this paper, we examine how the presence of country insurance schemes affects policymakers' incentives to undertake reforms. Such schemes (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) are more likely to foster than to delay reform in crisis-prone volatile economies. The...

We review heterogeneous agent-based models of financial stability and their application in stress tests. In contrast to the mainstream approach, which relies heavily on the rational expectations assumption and focuses on situations where it is possible to compute an equilibrium, this approach...