An important new dimension of the regulatory environment in banking and insurance is the explicit reliance on market discipline. Expectation: A transparent market will require less overt intervention by regulators (market participants themselves force appropriate behavior)...

This paper analyzes price competition in the German motor insurance market since 1994 and looks for evidence to back up a claim frequently found in the trade literature—that there have been two recent price wars in this industry, the first in 1996–1999, the second in 2005–2006. In a first...

This article provides an overview and comparison of risk-based capital (RBC) requirements as they currently exist in the United States, the European Union, Switzerland, and New Zealand. These four systems are representative of different ways capital standards are implemented around the globe....

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and new empirical evidence on frontier effi-ciency measurement in the insurance industry, a topic of great interest in the academic literature during the last several years. In the first step, we review 87 studies and put them into a joint...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method from the area of operationsresearch that measures the relationship of produced outputs to assignedinputs and determines an efficiency score. This efficiency score can be interpretedas a performance measure in investment analysis. Recent...

As early as the 1970s, European Union (EU) member countries implemented rulesto coordinate insurance markets and regulation. However, with the more recentmovement toward a general single EU market, financial services regulation hastaken on new meaning and priority. Solvency I regulations went...

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) models an insurance company’s cash flow inorder to forecast assets, liabilities, and ruin probabilities, as well as full balancesheets for different scenarios. In the last years DFA has become an important toolfor the analysis of an insurance company’s...