We analyze an initiative by insurance regulators to reform capital regulations for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) by replacing credit ratings with third-party estimates of expected credit losses and by considering an insurer's exposure to future losses when determining regulatory capital....

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...

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,...

Solvency II has one standard equity solvency capital requirement for type 1 or developed market stocks (39 percent) and one for type 2 or emerging market stocks (49 percent). As such, differences in financial economic risk of stock portfolios within developed or emerging markets do not influence...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

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...

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...

We develop a novel approach to the bond portfolio optimization in insurance companies that are subject to the new Solvency II regulation. The regulatory efficient portfolios are determined using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). The characteristics of the estimated...

This manuscript summarizes a speech given at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia on May 14, 2013. The speech begins with a discussion of ethical theory and how it can be applied to the topic of government regulation of business, and proceeds to summarize some recent studies on the costs...