This research explores two aspects of European insurers' investment behaviour related to crises. While they are often considered as financial market stabilisers and long-term investors, there is currently a lack of knowledge about insurers' investment behaviour in crises under the regulatory...

This article will focus on the research for the strategic allocation of reserve fund of the Moroccan pension scheme in order to ensure and improve its solvency. The first aim of this paper is to construct and test an Economic Scenario Generator (ESG) based on a model inspired of the Ahlgrim...

Insurance companies and banks regularly have to face stress tests performed by regulatory instances. To model their investment decision problems that includes stress scenarios, we propose the worst-case portfolio approach. Thus, the resulting optimal portfolios are already stress test prone by...

In this article we consider the post-retirement phase optimization problem for a specific pension product in Germany that comes without guarantees. The continuous-time optimization problem is defined consisting of two specialties: first, we have a product-specific pension adjustment mechanism...

I assess how Basel III, Solvency II and the low interest rate environment will affect the financial connection between the bank and insurance sector by changing the funding patterns of banks as well as the investment strategies of life insurance companies. Especially for life insurance...

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...

This paper argues that the Eurozone crisis stems from a risk management failure in the Eurosystem’s design, and that applying insurance theory is useful. We model risk neutral agents choosing portfolios of government bonds of n countries in a monetary union and other assets. We firstly analyse...

The present SUERF Study includes a selection of papers based on the authors’ contributions to the Vienna conference, jointly organized by SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research. In reply to the financial crisis, the Great Recession and sovereign debt crisis, many central...

This thesis was written by Nadjeschda Katharina Arnold while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in...

This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more "normal" financial conditions. Our calibrated lifecycle dynamic model with realistic tax, minimum distribution,...