Between 2016 and 2022, life insurers in several European countries experienced negative longterm interest rates, which put pressure on their business models. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of negative interest rates on the stock performance of life insurers. To...

Dynamic hybrid products emerged in 2007 and are now well established in the German life insurance market. In this article, we study interaction effects between dynamic hybrid products and traditional deferred annuity contracts, that are sold by the same insurance company. The key question we...

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 examines a change in the level of competition in the Japanese life insurance industry over the last 17 years. We estimate the first order condition for profit-maximizing insurance oligopolies to obtain the degree of non-competition and collusion. Estimation results suggest that: 1)...

Rather than taking on more risk, US insurers hit hard by the crisis pulled back from risk taking, relative to insurers hit less hard by the crisis. Capital requirements alone do not explain this risk reduction: insurers hit hard reduced risk within assets with identical regulatory treatment....

In Deutschland, aber auch im Euroraum hat die historisch beispiellose expansive Geldpolitik der Europäischen Zentralbank den rückläufigen Zinstrend beschleunigt und zu einem ausgeprägten Niedrigzinsumfeld geführt. Mittlerweile gehen von der Geldpolitik aber kaum noch realwirtschaftliche...

Market risks account for an integral part of life insurers' risk profiles. This paper explores the market risk sensitivities of insurers in two large life insurance markets, namely the U.S. and Europe. Based on panel regression models and daily market data from 2012 to 2018, we analyze the...

Annuities are perceived as being illiquid financial instruments, and this has limited their attractiveness to consumers and their inclusion in financial models. However, short positions in annuities can be replicated using life insurance and debt, permitting long positions in annuities to be...

Payments of life insurance products depend on the uncertain future evolution of survival probabilities. This uncertainty is referred to as longevity risk. Existing literature shows that the effect of longevity risk on single life annuities can be substantial, and that there exists a (natural)...

In this paper, we provide micro-econometric evidence on the determinants of life insurance demand in China, the largest emerging market in the world. We employ the China Household Income Project (CHIP) dataset for the year 2002 in the analysis. The timing is ideal, because of the nature of the...