This paper examines the reciprocal lending relationships between financial conglomerates (FCs) in the repo market to better understand the following key points: what motivates powerful firms to engage in this type of contemporaneous cross-funding relationship; and the implications of such...

Until its liberalisation in 1994 exclusive agents dominated the distribution of products in the German life insurance industry. Since then, their importance has been declining for the benefit of both distribution via direct distribution channel and independent agents. However, the market shares...

To explain the success of different distribution strategies in the life insurance industry, we analyze the performance of single- and multi-channel distribution firms in the German life insurance industry. We estimate cost and profit efficiency for three groups of life insurers: multi-channel...

Deregulation and the succeeding changes, such as forming group affiliation, demutualization, and new entry from foreign countries, are widespread and worldwide phenomenon in the life insurance industry. This study examines impacts of the deregulation and the succeeding changes on efficiency of...

The top 100 international (re)insurance groups account for 85% of the global insurance assets and thus are the driving force of the global insurance supply. Yet little is known about their internal structure, business focus and the international footprint. We fill the gap by providing the first...

This article deals with the impact of intermediaries on insurance market transparency and performance. In a market exhibiting product differentiation and coexistence of perfectly and imperfectly informed consumers, competition among insurers leads to non-existence of a pure-strategy market...

We examine the impact of intermediation on insurance market transparency and performance. in a differentiated insurance market under imperfect information, consumers can gain information about product suitability by consulting an intermediary. We analyze current broker compensation methods:...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether insurers could have a strong motivation for M&A in the future because they need to survive within the industry under oversaturated market conditions. Recently, Japanese non-life insurance markets, mainly the automobile insurance market,...

In the insurance industry, the number of product-specific policies from different companies has increased significantly. The strong market competition has boosted the demand for a competitive premium. In actuarial science, scant literature still exists on how competition actually affects the...

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...