This paper investigates why U.S. life insurance groups use shadow insurance, i.e., reinsure their risks using affiliated, unauthorized, and unrated off-balance sheet entities rather than traditional reinsurers, and how such activities are allocated to individual group members. We find that such...

We summarize recent trends in risk exposure for U.S. life insurers from variable annuities, shadow insurance, securities lending, and derivatives. We discuss how these sources of risk could be amplified and transmitted to the rest of the financial sector and the real economy. More complete and...

The use of bank-owned life insurance (BOLI) has more than tripled since 2001 and has caught the attention of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. We find increases in BOLI lead to higher levels of liquidity risk, credit risk, and interest rate risk. Robustness tests confirm these...

Understanding the movement of capital between insurers and affiliated companies under common ownership is important for understanding insurer insolvency risk and the impact of regulatory policies regarding capital standards and group supervision. Aggregate data indicate that life insurers...

The use of captive reinsurance arrangements in life insurance has generated significant debate and led to recent adoption of new regulatory requirements by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). This paper provides an overview of the regulatory reserve requirements that...

Life insurers massively sell savings contracts with surrender options which allow policyholders to withdraw a guaranteed amount before maturity. These options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Using data on German life insurers, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in...

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

The solvency and market conduct regulations play a crucial role in supporting life insurance development by boosting consumer confidence and securing a stable environment for insurers to write business. The regulation encapsulates not only the legal framework but also its enforcement. We focus...

We reexamine life insurance and annuity pricing during the 2008 financial crisis. In contrastwith previous research, we find that insurers sold policies at significantly elevated markups overtheir fundamental values during the crisis months and, moreover, that statutory accountingpressures had...