Life insurers typically grant policyholders a surrender option. We demonstrate that the resulting lapse risk could materialise in the form of a "policyholder run" if interest rates were to increase sharply. An inverse stress test based on a unique set of regulatory panel data suggests that...

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...

The life insurance sector is exposed to systematic liquidity risk, because policyholders would have a common incentive to surrender their policies in the event of a severe macroeconomic shock. Life insurers would, then, have to sell assets, and these fire sales would amplify the original shock....

We study the effect of risk management on policy sales (life insurance and annuities) of life insurers. For identification, we exploit the staggered adoption of Section 711 of the Insurer Receivership Model Act, granting derivatives counterparties of insurers the right to terminate the contract...

The topic of insolvency risk in connection with life insurance companies has recently attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, the question is investigated of how the values of the equity and of the liability of a life insurance company are affected by the default risk and the choice...

Life insurers typically grant policyholders a surrender option. We demonstrate that the resulting lapse risk could materialise in the form of a "policyholder run" if interest rates were to increase sharply. An inverse stress test based on a unique set of regulatory panel data suggests that...

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

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...

The paper builds on the current discussion on reforming insurance regulation in light of the EU's move towards the Solvency II regime and studies the agency problem in a life insurance environment. It compares different regulatory regimes in their effectiveness to control the owner's incentive...

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)...