Low interest rates are becoming a threat to the stability of the life insurance industry, especially in countries such as Germany, where products with relatively high guaranteed returns sold in the past still represent a prominent share of the total portfolio. This contribution aims to assess...

Coming (great) events cast their (long) shadow before. As the financial crisis gave birth to the creation of the European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS), the imminent Brexit now serves as an impulse to rather extensively reorganize it. Pursuant to the preferences of the Commission—as...

This paper compares the shareholder-value-maximising capital structure and pricing policy of insurance groups against that of stand-alone insurers. Groups can utilise intra-group risk diversification by means of capital and risk transfer instruments. We show that using these instruments enables...

The European insurance industry is awaiting the new EU-wide harmonised Solvency II framework. Before its introduction, it is important to find out which incentive effects can arise from it. Practitioners predict a trend towards consolidation in the insurance sector due to recognition of...

The Liikanen Group proposes contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds as a potential mechanism to enhance financial stability in the banking industry. Especially life insurance companies could serve as CoCo bond holders as they are already the largest purchasers of bank bonds in Europe. We develop a...

The Liikanen Group proposes contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds as a potential mechanism to enhance financial stability in the banking industry. Especially life insurance companies could serve as CoCo bond holders as they are already the largest purchasers of bank bonds in Europe. We develop a...

Motivated by a recent demographic study establishing a link between macroeconomic fluctuations and the mortality index kt in the Lee-Carter model, we assess the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the solvency of a life insurance company. Liabilities in our stochastic simulation framework...

Lack of transparency in securitization transactions significantly contributed to the severe financial crisis of 2007–2009. To increase transparency we propose a new mechanism: financial claims with fingerprints. They would allow market participants at each stage of the securitization process...