This paper documents that the bond investments of insurance companies transmit shocks from insurance markets to the real economy. Liquidity windfalls from household insurance purchases increase insurers' demand for corporate bonds. Exploiting the fact that insurers persistently invest in a small...

Purpose - Despite the sophisticated regulatory regime established in Solvency II, analysts should be able to consider other less complex indicators of the soundness of insurers. The Z-score measure, which has traditionally been used as a proxy of individual risk in the banking sector, may be a...

This study investigates scope economies, organizational form, and insolvency risk for a sample of takaful firms in 19 countries. Firm efficiency is estimated using data envelopment analysis, performance is also gauged using return on equity and return on assets, and insolvency risk is measured...

For insurance firms, underwriting and investment strategies are defined as the dollar weights allocated to underwriting activities (direct premium, net reinsurance, etc.) and the investment of assets respectively. Using a sample of 83 Canadian property-liability insurance companies for 1996 to...

This paper compares six different approaches to calculate Z-score using a final dataset of 183 insurers (1,382 observations) operating in the Spanish insurance sector during the period 2010-2017. This measure of risk has widely been used in the banking literature, and it has recently been...

Over the last decade, stress testing has become a central aspect of the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance work. Recently, more emphasis has also been placed on the role of insurance for financial stability analysis. This paper reviews the current state of system-wide solvency stress...

We test the hypothesis that practicing Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) reduces firms' cost of reducing risk. Adoption of ERM represents a radical paradigm shift from the traditional method of managing risks individually to managing risks collectively allowing ERM-adopting firms to better...

This study examines the relation between incentives and risk taking for 466 insurer-year observations over 2006-2010. Our results show that independent director compensation is positively related to risk taking as is CEO compensation and institutional ownership. Besides dollar value and...

Does a catastrophe bond issue increase the insurance firm value to shareholders? By issuing such bonds, insurance companies that are exposed to weather claims, can share their risk with investors, managing the corporate risk. The academic literature argues that hedging activities can increase a...

We investigate the effects of adopting enterprise risk management (ERM) on the performance and risks of European publicly listed insurance firms. Using a dataset for 24 years, we report new results which show that ERM adopters realize significant ERM premiums after controlling for other...