I examine competition in the sector of mortgage life insurance, in particular the periodic switching right (PSR), by which the borrower can change his insurer once every period (say, every year). The PSR is likely to have pro competitive effects (lower premium), but by the same move, to lead to...

One of the most contentious issues raised during the recent crisis has been the potentially exacerbating role played by mark-to-market accounting. Many have proposed the use of historical cost accounting, promoting its ability to avoid the amplification of systemic risk. We caution against...

We provide new empirical evidence concerning the contentious debate over the use of historical cost (HCA) versus mark-to-market (MTM) accounting in regulating financial institutions. These accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, alter financial institutions’...

This paper examines the impact of cybercrime and hacking events on equity market volatility across publicly traded corporations. The volatility influence of these cybercrime events is shown to be dependent on the number of clients exposed across all sectors and the type of the cyber security...

This paper provides a means of estimating how ‘Solvency II' regulations — introduced in the European Union in January 2016 — might affect UK life insurers' incentives to hold different types of financial assets, and how these asset holdings are likely to vary in the face of hypothetical...

In this paper, we discuss our research on the effects of regulatory forbearance on the outcomes for high-risk and distressed property-casualty insurance companies. A fundamental question that has been examined in the extant literature is whether greater regulatory forbearance tends to increase...

In this paper, we examine the effects of state rate regulatory stringency on insurers' loss ratios at the firm level in homeowners insurance. We use several different measures of regulation per se and regulatory stringency. In one model, we use the type of state rating law as our measure of...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which the design of regulatory banking and insurance capital standards (Basel II/III and Solvency II) provide incentives for endogenously‐generated destabilising effects to the financial system. The literature has identified three areas...

Credit derivatives played an important role in the Credit Crisis of 2008-09. The US Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 as a comprehensive response to the Credit Crisis. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which...

There has been a significant increase in the use of social media and the volume of personal information provided on social networking websites. As such, social media has the potential for a variety of uses by businesses, including insurers. As the use becomes more widespread, insurers must...