The existing literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that securities lenders primarily respond to demand from borrowers and reinvest their cash collateral through short-term markets. Using a new dataset that matches every U.S. life insurer's bond portfolio, as well as their lending and...

Life insurers use reinsurance to move liabilities from regulated and rated companies that sell policies to shadow reinsurers, which are less regulated and unrated off-balance-sheet entities within the same insurance group. U.S. life insurance and annuity liabilities ceded to shadow reinsurers...

The recent wave of demutualizations has led to the declining significance of the mutual organizational form in the U.S. life insurance industry. In this paper, we consider the different methods of conversion to explore if the motivations were similar across the firms that chose to fully...

We document two puzzling facts during the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. First, we find no significant differences among US life insurers' profitability before or after 1918. Second, there are fewer insurers in distress after the outbreak. We argue that an increase in insurance demand offset...

The interaction of worsening fundamentals and strategic complementarities among investors renders identification of self-fulfilling runs challenging. We propose a dynamic model to show how exogenous variation in firms' liability structures can be exploited to obtain variation in the strength of...

We study the role of target insurer boards and the post-acquisition retention of target directors in U.S. life insurer mergers and acquisitions. Our results indicate that board characteristics affect the likelihood of acquisition. Smaller boards, boards with better reputations and boards without...

The securities lending market for corporate bonds relies on the willingness of institutional investors to lend their bond holdings. Life insurers are major suppliers of bonds in the securities lending market. By lending their bonds against cash collateral, insurers create short-term liabilities...

The interaction of worsening fundamentals and strategic complementarities among investors renders identification of self-fulfilling runs challenging. We propose a dynamic model to show how exogenous variation in firms' liability structures can be exploited to obtain variation in the strength of...

The interaction of worsening fundamentals and strategic complementarities among investors renders identification of self-fulfilling runs challenging. We propose a dynamic model to show how exogenous variation in firms' liability structures can be exploited to obtain variation in the strength of...

We use a two factor model of life insurer stock returns to measure interest rate risk at U.S. and U.K. insurers. Our estimates show that interest rate risk among U.S. life insurers increased as interest rates decreased to historically low levels in recent years. For life insurers in the U.K., in...