Modern regulatory capital standards, such as the Solvency II standard formula, employ a correlation based approach for risk aggregation. The so-called "square-root formula" uses correlation parameters between, for example, market risk, non-life insurance risk and default risk to determine the...

Tail-correlation matrices are an important tool for aggregating risk measurements across risk categories, asset classes and/or business segments. This paper demonstrates that traditional tail-correlation matriceshich are conventionally assumed to have ones on the diagonalan lead to substantial...

This study investigates whether banks and insurance corporations perform regulatory arbitrage by buying bonds with inflated credit ratings. We argue that credit rating based capital requirements incentivize banks and insurance corporations to hold more bonds with inflated credit ratings. We...

Historical evidence like the global financial crisis from 2007-09 highlights that sector concentration risk can play an important role for the solvency of insurers. However, current microprudential frameworks like the US RBC framework and Solvency II consider only name concentration risk...

I develop an algorithm to approximate the loss rate distribution for fixed income portfolios with obligor concentrations. The approximation requires no advanced mathematics or statistics, only the summation of large exposures and the evaluation of binomial probabilities. The approximation is...

Solvency II is a new risk-based framework for setting the capital requirements of European insurance companies, in force since January 2016. The solvency capital requirement (SCR) is set such that the insurer can meet its obligations over the next 12 months with a probability of at least 99.5%....

When a firm sponsoring a defined benefit pension plan approaches financial distress, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) insurance effect materializes and the optimal pension portfolio policy becomes aggressive. In this configuration, a regulation restricting the pension investment...

The present paper analyzes optimal supervisory rules for pension funds taking account of diverse pension security mechanisms: support provided by either a pension guarantee fund, a plan sponsor or by both. Assuming that the regulatory rule is either to control the shortfall probability or...