The existing literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that securities lenders primarily respond to demand from borrowers and reinvest their cash collateral through short-term markets. Using a new dataset that matches every U.S. life insurer's bond portfolio, as well as their lending and...

On 11 March 2015, SUERF jointly organised a conference with the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Austrian Society for Bank Research (Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft - BWG). The present SUERF Study 2015/2 includes a selection of papers based on the authors' contributions to the Vienna...

Overview of the Korean life insurance industry in early 2000s with emphasis on the typically small allocations to foreign or overseas securities and funds and to alternative investments such as hedge funds, managed futures and the like. Reasons for the reluctance of Korean life insurers to do so...

Managing retirement wealth is one of the major financial decisions that individuals face. In this setting, I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock...

With a sample of twelve US bond indices spanning different maturities, credit ratings and industry sectors, we investigate the impact of new bank capital regulation for trading portfolios introduced by Basel III. Specifically, we estimate the new capital requirements for (a) liquidity risk and...

In recent years within Insurance companies measures like RAROC (Risk Adjusted Return on Capital) have become more popular for Balance Sheet Management purposes. RAROC is a performance measure that quantifies the amount of return per unit of risk that can be obtained by a certain entity.Measures...

The Pension Bene fit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) registers a preoccupying financial condition since 2002. This paper builds a theoretical framework for defi ning its optimal asset allocation in a continuous-time stochastic world. We first recognize the PBGC 's put seller nature and derive...

By employing Moody‘s corporate default and rating transition data spanning the last 90 years we explore how much capital banks should hold against their corporate loan portfolios to withstand historical stress scenarios. Specifically, we shall focus on the worst case scenario over the...

We develop a new class of utility functions, SAHARA utility, with the distinguishing feature that it allows absolute risk aversion to be non-monotone and implements the assumption that agents may become less risk-averse for very low values of wealth. The class contains the well-known exponential...

• We offer the first empirical exploration of fixed indexed annuity returns based upon actual contracts that were sold and actual interest that was credited.• Annuity returns have been competitive with alternative portfolios of stocks and bonds.• Their design has limited the downside...