Life insurers sell savings contracts with surrender options, allowing policyholders to prematurely withdraw guaranteed surrender values. Surrender options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Hence, higher interest rates raise surrender rates, as we document for the German life...

We construct a dynamic model economy in which investors from segmented markets have varying financial asset demands. Intermediaries make arbitrage profits by exploiting the price spreads across markets. Meanwhile, they are required to separately post collateral to support arbitrage trades. We...