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We investigate heterogeneity in patterns of preferences for health insurance features using health insurance choice data from a controlled laboratory experiment. Within the experiment, participants make consecutive insurance choices based on choice sets that vary in composition and size. We keep the health risk constant and equal for everyone. In addition, we implement a treatment that entails a feature-based insurance filter, allowing us to validate feature preferences. We also account for individually elicited risk preferences. On aggregate, we find that there is considerable heterogeneity in consumer choice. Participants differ particularly (a) in their willingness to pay to insure themselves against illnesses that differ in terms of their probability of occurrence and the size of the losses to be covered and (b) in their preference to forgo deductibles. However, if we measure the quality of individuals' decisions based on risk preferences, the heterogeneity among participants disappears. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in health insurance choices is not reflected in decision quality when we assume a rank-dependent expected utility model of risk preferences.

In crisis times, insurance companies might feel the pressure to present a performance of their investment portfolios that is superior to the market, since investment portfolios back the claims of policyholders and serve as a signal for the claims' safety. I seek to show whether a stock market crisis as experienced over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic influences insurance firms' decisions on the allocation of credit risk bearing assets in their investment portfolio. I find, consistently with previous research, that insurers shift their portfolio holdings towards lower credit risk assets as financial market conditions tighten. This tendency seems to be restricted by the liquidity risk of high-yield assets, and the credit risk of lower-rated investment-grade assets. Both effects ultimately lead to a larger fraction of less liquid assets during the crisis and the recovery.

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits through delayed claiming. We determine that including deferred income annuities in DC accounts is welfare enhancing for all sex/education groups examined. We also show that providing access to well-designed variable deferred annuities with some equity exposure further enhances retiree wellbeing, compared to having access only to fixed annuities. Nevertheless, for the least educated, delaying claiming Social Security is preferred, whereas the most educated benefit more from using accumulated DC plan assets to purchase deferred annuities.

Most insurers in the European Union determine their regulatory capital requirements based on the standard formula of Solvency II. However, there is evidence that the standard formula inaccurately reflects insurers' risk situation and may provide misleading steering incentives. In the second pillar, Solvency II requires insurers to perform a so-called 'Own Risk and Solvency Assessment' (ORSA). In their ORSA, insurers must establish their own risk measurement approaches, including those based on scenarios, in order to derive suitable risk assessments and address shortcomings of the standard formula. The idea of this paper is to identify scenarios in such a way that the standard formula in connection with the ORSA provides a reliable basis for risk management decisions. Using an innovative method for scenario identification, our approach allows for a simple but relatively precise assessment of marginal and even non-marginal portfolio changes. We numerically evaluate the proposed approach in the context of market risk employing an internal model from the academic literature and the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR) calculation under Solvency II.

We analyze efficient risk-sharing arrangements when the value from deviating is determined endogenously by another risk sharing arrangement. Coalitions form to insure against idiosyncratic income risk. Self-enforcing contracts for both the original coalition and any coalition formed (joined) after deviations rely on a belief in future cooperation which we term "trust". We treat the contracting conditions of original and deviation coalitions symmetrically and show that higher trust tightens incentive constraints since it facilitates the formation of deviating coalitions. As a consequence, although trust facilitates the initial formation of coalitions, the extent of risk sharing in successfully formed coalitions is declining in the extent of trust and efficient allocations might feature resource burning or utility burning: trust is indeed a double-edged sword.

Frequent climate shocks require farmers in developing countries to increase their resilience. Although index insurance is often discussed as a promising climate adaptation strategy, take-up rates are still low. This study primarily explores the role of peer behavior as peer imitation in the demand for three marketable and unsubsidized crop index insurance options. Furthermore, the influence of trust and understanding is investigated. We collected data in lab-in-the-field experiments among farmers in Kyrgyzstan, where index insurance is planned for imminent implementation. Applying ordered logit estimations, our results show significant and strong peer imitation effects. Imitation attitudes decrease with own insurance experience and received insurance payouts, but intensify with peer size, insurance trust and practical insurance understanding. While trust robustly increases index insurance adoption, understanding effects only gain significance in the dynamic perspective. These findings underline the importance of community-based extension treatments and trust toward the uptake of innovative agricultural technologies in the first steps of dissemination.

Recent proposals for a still missing European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) argue in favor of a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE model with bank default to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more effective in stabilizing real activity, credit, and welfare than a national fiscal backstop. We demonstrate that risk-weighted contributions to EDIS are welfare-beneficial for depositors and discuss trade-offs policymakers face during the implementation of EDIS. We also find that macroprudential regulation and EDIS can complement each other and that EDIS can prevent bank runs under certain conditions. April 18, 2023 (revised version)

Mit diesem Bericht dokumentiert das Institut für Versicherungswesen (ivwKöln) seine Forschungsaktivitäten des vergangenen Jahres. Wir geben damit gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit und insbesondere den Freunden und Förderern des Instituts Rechenschaft über die geleistete Forschungsarbeit. Darüber hinaus wollen wir in diesem Forschungsbericht auch darlegen, welche Forschungsziele wir am Institut verfolgen und welche Aktivitäten derzeit geplant sind. By this report, the Institute of Insurance Studies documents its research activities of the past year. We render account to the public and to our friends and supporters. We also want to explain the target of our research work and give a short outlook on the planned future activities.

We study yield spreads between government bonds in the European Monetary Union. This segment of the global fixed income market is of particular importance for insurance companies in Europe. Our empirical research strategy is inspired by Gunay (2020) who has analyzed the relationship between credit and liquidity risk in the United States using Granger causality tests. More specifically, we employ the procedure developed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995) to test for Granger causality among yield spreads in five different member countries of the European Monetary Union (namely Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Ireland) relative to Germany. We examine interest rate data from bonds with three different maturities (5, 10 and 30 years). Given the importance of long-term bonds as asset class for European life insurers and pension funds, the empirical results from the often ignored market for government bonds with a maturity of 30 years should be of interest. With regard to long-term sovereign debt, there is no evidence for Granger causality among the time series examined here. Consequently, the risk premia required by investors to hold government bonds of one specific member country of the EMU do not help to forecast the risk premia that have to be paid by other countries. Given the structure of their liabilities, this empirical finding should be of high relevance for portfolio and risk managers in the European life insurance industry and in pension funds. With regard to the yield spreads to be observed in the market for 10-year government bonds, there seems to be no clear picture. Focusing on fixed income securities with a maturity of 5 years, there is one very interesting empirical finding. The test results reported here seem to imply that there is unidirectional Granger causality running from the yield spreads in all other four countries to Austria. Given that Austria is a comparably small country which is assumed to be in a fiscally stable position, this result could be interpreted as evidence for credit risk premia as being helpful to forecast liquidity risk premia in the market for medium-term government bonds issued by member states of the European Monetary Union., Diese Studie untersucht Zinsdifferenzen am Markt von Staatsanleihen der Mitgliedsländer der Europäischen Währungsunion. Dieses Segment des globalen Rentenmarktes hat eine besondere Bedeutung für europäische Versicherungsunternehmen. Unsere empirische Studie ist von Gunay (2000) inspiriert, der den Zusammenhang zwischen Kredit- und Liquiditätsrisiko in den Vereinigten Staaten mittels Grangerkausalitätstests untersucht. Genauer gesagt findet hier der Ansatz von Toda und Yamamoto (1995) Anwendung. Untersucht werden die Zinsdifferenzen von fünf Ländern (Österreich, Belgien, Frankreich, Italien und Irland) zu Deutschland. Dabei wird auf drei Laufzeiten (5, 10 und 30 Jahre) geblickt. Der häufig in empirischen Studien ignorierte Markt für Staatsanleihen mit einer Restlaufzeit von 30 Jahren dürfte aufgrund der Struktur der Verbindlichkeiten von besonderem Interesse für Lebensversicherer und Pensionsfonds sein. In diesem Segment des europäischen Staatsanleihemarktes konnten wir keine Hinweise auf Grangerkausalität zwischen den Zinsdifferenzen finden. Die von den hier betrachteten Ländern für ihre Schulden zu zahlenden Risikoprämien helfen somit nicht, die Risikoprämien in den jeweils anderen untersuchten Nationen vorherzusagen. Dieses Ergebnis sollte von hoher Bedeutung für Kapitalanleger und Risikomanager bei europäischen Lebensversicherungen und Pensionsfonds sein. Im Laufzeitsegment 10 Jahre ergibt sich kein klares Bild. Bei den Zinsdifferenzen der Papiere mit einer Laufzeit von 5 Jahren zeigt sich dagegen klar, dass die Risikoprämien in allen anderen Ländern helfen, die Zinsdifferenz von Österreich zu Deutschland vorherzusagen. Da Österreich eher ein kleines Land mit relativ soliden Staatsfinanzen ist, mag dieses Ergebnis ein Hinweis darauf sein, dass das Kreditrisiko in diesem Segment des europäischen Rentenmarktes zur Prognose des Liquiditätsrisikos verwendet werden kann.

We use data from a large US life expectancy provider to test for asymmetric information in the secondary life insurance—or life settlements —market. We compare realized lifetimes for a subsample of settled policies relative to all (settled and nonsettled) policies, and find a positive settlement‐survival correlation indicating the existence of informational asymmetry between policyholders and investors. Estimates of the “excess hazard” associated with settling show the effect is temporary and wears off over approximately 8 years. This indicates individuals in our sample possess private information with regards to their near‐term survival prospects and make use of it, which has economic consequences for this market and beyond. Asymmetric information life settlements life expectancy secondary insurance market D12 G22 J10

We build a model to simulate how the euro area market-based financial system may function under stress. The core of the model is a set of representative agents re ecting key economic sectors, which interact in asset, funding, and derivatives markets and face solvency and liquidity constraints on their behaviour. We illustrate the model's behaviour in a twolayer approach. In Layer 1 the deterioration in the outlook for the corporate sector triggers portfolio reallocation by the model's agents. Layer 2 adds a rating downgrade shock where a fraction of investment grade corporate bonds is downgraded to high yield, which creates further rebalancing pressure and price movements. The model predicts (i) asset ows (buying and selling of marketable securities) across agents and (ii) balance sheet losses. It also provides quantitative evidence on equilibrium effects of the macroprudential regulation of nonbanks, which we illustrate by varying investment fund cash buffers.We identify the effect of climate change-related regulatory risks on credit real- location, Our evidence suggests that effects depend borrower's region, Following an increase in salience of regulatory risks, banks reallocate credit to US firms that could be negatively impacted by regulatory interventions, Conversely, in Europe, banks lend more to firms that could benefit from environmental regulation, The effect is moderated by banks' own loan portfolio composition, Banks with a portfolio tilted towards firms that could be negatively affected by environmental policies increasingly support these firms, Overall, our results indicate that financial impli- cations of regulation associated with climate change appear to be the main drivers of banks' behavior.

We study the factors that predict medical malpractice ("med mal") insurance premia, using national data from Medical Liability Monitor over 1990 to 2017. A number of core findings are not easily explained by standard economic theory. First, we estimate long run elasticities of premia to insurers' direct cost (payouts plus defense costs), allowing for lags of up to four years, of only around +0.40, when one might expect elasticities near one. Second, state caps on malpractice damages predict a roughly 50% higher ratio of premia to direct costs even though, in competitive markets, a damages cap should affect premia primarily through effect on cost. A difference-in-differences analysis of the "new cap" states that adopted caps during the early 2000's provides evidence supporting a causal link between cap adoption and the ratio of premium to direct cost. Third, the premium-to-cost ratio, which one might expect to be fairly constant over time, instead varies widely both across states at a given time and within states across time. Our results suggest that insurance companies do not fully adjust revenues to changes in direct costs even over long time periods. Insurers in new-cap states have been able to charge apparently supra-competitive prices for a sustained period.

Preparing for the monetary loss associated with premature death of the breadwinner has become more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, very little is known about how much of the financial vulnerabilities are covered by the life insurance holdings in different population groups. We employ unique individual-level life insurance data of the Finnish population to study the voluntary life insurances, the components of financial loss following from a death of a breadwinner, and the gap in death cover (life insurance gap) calculated as the difference of the two. We find that only about 10% of Finns have a voluntary life insurance, and that they are concentrated on married people, people of working age and with higher income. The largest insurance gaps are among young individuals, men, high income and highly educated people. We also find that the insurance behavior is poorly explained by the net losses following from a death.

Mit diesem Bericht dokumentiert das Institut für Versicherungswesen (ivwKöln) seine Forschungsaktivitäten des vergangenen Jahres. Wir geben damit gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit und insbesondere den Freunden und Förderern des Instituts Rechenschaft über die geleistete Forschungsarbeit. Darüber hinaus wollen wir in diesem Forschungsbericht auch darlegen, welche Forschungsziele wir am Institut verfolgen und welche Aktivitäten derzeit geplant sind. By this report, the Institute of Insurance Studies documents its research activities of the past year. We render account to the public and to our friends and supporters. We also want to explain the target of our research work and give a short outlook on the planned future activities.

Why did shareholder liability disappear? We address this question by looking at its use by British insurance companies from 1830 until its complete disappearance by 1975. We explore three explanations for its demise: (1) regulation and government-provided policyholder protection meant that it was no longer required; (2) it had become de facto limited; and (3) shareholders saw an opportunity to expunge something they disliked when insurance companies grew in size. Using hand-collected archival data, our findings suggest investors attached a risk premium to shareholder liability, and it was phased out after a merger movement increased the size of insurance companies which meant that they were better able to pool risks.

This report employs individual-level register data to study the coverage and amounts of voluntary term life insurances, the monetary losses following from the death of a breadwinner, and the life insurance gap arising as the difference of the two. The data include information on the life insurances of Finnish individuals and their individual and household level information between 2018 and 2020. We find that 8 % of the individuals have at least one type of term life insurance in the data. For them the average life insurance is 73 000 €. The take up of life insurances differ between groups, and it is more frequent among working-age, married and higher income individuals. The life insurance gap calculations account for a number of changes in living standards following from a death of a breadwinner, including those in household income, consumption, existing wealth, survivors' pensions and life insurances. For those individuals who have earned income and who live in families consisting of at least two persons the average life insurance gap is between 65 000 € and 70 000 €. This is the amount of additional life insurance that would retain the consumption possibilities the same as before the breadwinner's death. For those who have a voluntary life insurance the gap is on average close to zero. Therefore, the life insurance gap arises mainly among those people not having a life insurance at all.

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 subset of firms for identification, I show that these increases in bond demand raise bond prices and lower firms' funding costs. In response, firms issue more bonds, especially when their bond underwriters are well connected with investors. Firms use the proceeds to raise investment rather than equity payouts. The results emphasize the significant impact of investor demand on firms' financing and investment activities.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) continues to gain momentum in the financial market space for various reasons, starting with the looming effect of climate change and the drive toward a net-zero economy. Existing SRI approaches have included environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria as a further dimension to portfolio selection, but these approaches focus on classical investors and do not account for specific aspects of insurance companies. In this paper, we consider the stock selection problem of life insurance companies. In addition to stock risk, our model set-up includes other important market risk categories of insurers, namely interest rate risk and credit risk. In line with common standards in insurance solvency regulation, such as Solvency II, we measure risk using the solvency ratio, i.e. the ratio of the insurer's market-based equity capital to the Value-at-Risk of all modeled risk categories. As a consequence, we employ a modification of Markowitz's Portfolio Selection Theory by choosing the "solvency ratio" as a downside risk measure to obtain a feasible set of optimal portfolios in a three-dimensional (risk, return, and ESG) capital allocation plane. We find that for a given solvency ratio, stock portfolios with a moderate ESG level can lead to a higher expected return than those with a low ESG level. A highly ambitious ESG level, however, reduces the expected return. Because of the specific nature of a life insurer's business model, the impact of the ESG level on the expected return of life insurers can substantially differ from the corresponding impact for classical investors.

Markov-Ketten haben bei der Modellierung von ökonomischen Sachverhalten eine Vielzahl von Anwendungen. In den Wirtschaftswissenschaften steht oft ein Portfolio von Markov -Ketten im Mittelpunkt des Interesses, z.B. das Kreditportfolio einer Bank oder das Vertragsportfolio einer Versicherung. In den meisten Modellen wird dabei die stochastische Unabhängigkeit der unterschiedlichen Markov -Ketten vorausgesetzt. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein Modell zur Berücksichtigung einer Abhängigkeitsstruktur in einem solchen Portfolio vorgestellt. Die Abhängigkeiten werden dabei mit einer Familie von Copulas modelliert und werden bei den Übergangsmatrizen berücksichtigt. Markov chains have a variety of applications in the modeling of economic facts. In economics, the focus is often on a portfolio of Markov chains, e.g. a bank's loan portfolio or an insurance contract portfolio. In most models, the stochastic independence of the different Markov chains is assumed. This paper presents a model for taking into account a dependency structure in such a portfolio. The dependencies are given with a family of copulas and are taken into account in the transition matrices.

This paper studies the propensities of the U.S. population to seek a full dose of vaccinations against the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the consideration of vaccine dissemination at the disaggregated or the local level, the main focus of this study is on determining whether a lack of health insurance significantly impacted vaccination propensities. If it is indeed the case that a lack of health insurance mattered, this would be informative for policymakers since they tried to address this aspect in the vaccine rollout by subsidizing and offering vaccines at a zero price. Our results show that the uninsured were less likely to be fully vaccinated against the pandemic and this finding holds across different modeling formulations. However, there were differences in the responses of the different population subgroups. The findings with respect to the vaccination propensities of the unvaccinated are noteworthy, especially significant given the fact the COVID-19 vaccines were made available free of cost to the public in the United States, irrespective of their insurance status. A policy lesson from these results is that perhaps a better outreach to communities of the uninsured to inform them about the costs and availability of the coronavirus vaccines would have been better. Interestingly, new covid cases did not significantly impact decisions to fully vaccinate, while greater prosperity made full vaccination more likely. We did not find robust evidence of the elderly having a greater propensity to be fully vaccinated. Finally, accounting for the political dimension, counties housing the seats of the state government had greater full vaccination rates, ceteris paribus.

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction of parametric (index) insurance products for various catastrophic risks. We compare parametric to indemnity insurance in a simple model where the insurance company has superior information about the probability of the event (reversed asymmetric information). We find that indemnity insurance tends to be welfare superior, because the coverage provided to agents who underestimate the event probability is larger than with parametric cover. Since it could plausibly be argued that a majority of the population is underestimating the risks of many types of extreme events, this difference in social welfare is potentially substantial.

Research on the financial events of 1720 in Britain has overwhelmingly focused on the South Sea Company, but price movements were much more dramatic in the shares of the newly incorporated London Assurance (LA) Company. This paper uses unique archival material on the London Assurance to address three important debates around the 1720 bubble. First, it examines competing claims around the bubble's price dynamics, finding that the largest price movements were driven by changes in the market structure for LA shares rather than by news about fundamentals. Second, it explores how the shareholder base changed during the bubble, finding that informed insiders were more likely to exit for a profit at the peak of the bubble. Finally, an examination of LA shareholder behaviour up to 1737 suggests that the bubble caused a loss of shareholder expertise, with detrimental consequences for the Company's governance. These results demonstrate how a bubble in the shares of a newly created company can lead to an exodus of informed investors, damaging the company's long-term prospects.

Disability Insurance (DI) may affect workers' outcomes such as their probability to enter DI, to recover, and their employment. Supplementary insurance may increase these moral hazard effects, but also increases the financial gains of private insurers to reduce benefit costs. With increased insurer activities to prevent and reintegrate workers, the overall effects of increased insurance coverage on workers' outcomes are thus ambiguous. This paper aims to separate worker and insurer responses to increased insurance, using unique administrative data on firms' supplementary DI insurance contracts. Using a Two-Way Fixed-Effects model on the sickness and employment rates of worker cohorts with and without supplementary contracts at some point in time, we find that insurer efforts compensate workers' moral hazard effects.

Life insurers massively sell savings contracts with surrender options which allow policyholders to withdraw a guaranteed amount before maturity. These options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Using data on German life insurers, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in interest rates raises surrender rates by 17 basis points. We quantify the resulting liquidity risk in a calibrated model of surrender decisions and insurance cash flows. Simulations predict that surrender options can force insurers to sell up to 3% of their assets, depressing asset prices by 90 basis points. The effect is amplified by the duration of insurers' investments, and its impact on the term structure of interest rates depends on life insurers' investment strategy.

The ability of monetary policy to influence the term structure of interest rates and the macroeconomy depends on the extent to which financial market participants prefer to hold bonds of different maturities. We microfound such preferred-habitat demand in a fully-specified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the macroeconomy where the term structure is arbitrage-free. The source of preferred habitat demand is an insurance fund that issues annuities and adopts a liability-driven strategy to minimise the duration risk on its balance sheet. The optimising behaviour of the insurance fund implies a preferred- habitat demand function that is upward-sloping in bond prices and downward-sloping in bond yields, especially when interest rates are low. This supports the operation of a recruitment channel at low interest rates, whereby long-term interest rates react strongly to short-term policy rates because of complementary changes in term premia induced by preferred-habitat demand. The strong reaction extends to in‡ation and output in general equilibrium, a through-the-looking-glass result that challenges conventional wisdom that preferred habitat weakens the transmission of monetary policy.

The employer-sponsored life insurance (ESLI) market is particularly susceptible to adverse selection due to community-rated premiums, guaranteed issue coverage, and the existence of a well-functioning individual market as a substitute. Using administrative payroll and healthcare claims data from a large university, we find evidence of adverse selection in the supplemental ESLI market. Employees in worse health, as measured by the Charlson's Comorbidity Index, are more likely to elect coverage than those in better health. Nonetheless, we also find that employees typically do not increase coverage following diagnosis of a severe illness even when they can without providing evidence of insurability. Furthermore, demand estimation shows that employees are not price-sensitive and that the estimated increases in premiums due to adverse selection are unlikely to cause significant welfare loss.

Public disability insurance (DI) programs in many countries face pressure to reduce their generosity in order to remain sustainable. In this paper, we investigate the welfare effects of giving a larger role to private insurance markets in the face of public DI cuts. Exploiting a unique reform that abolished one part of the German public DI system for younger workers, we find that despite significant crowding-in effects, overall private DI take-up remains modest. We do not find any evidence of adverse selection on unpriced risk. On the contrary, private DI tends to be concentrated among high-income, high-education and low-risk individuals. Using a revealed preferences approach, we estimate individual DI valuations, a key input for welfare calculations. We find that observed willingness-to-pay of many individuals is low, such that providing DI partly via a private insurance market with choice improves welfare. However, we show that distributional concerns as well as individual risk misperceptions can provide grounds for justifying a full public DI mandate.

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 covariates and endogeneity. Several firm characteristics such as size, opacity, and the choice of external monitoring agents such as auditors are significant determinants of adopting ERM. We fill a gap in the literature by assessing the impact of adopting ERM on firm risks and report new findings for our sample, which show that ERM adopters effectively reduce firm total and systematic risks and, to a greater extent, idiosyncratic risk. Firm-level variables such as size, leverage, dividend payments events, and diversification impact firm total risk. Insurers use corporate events such as dividend payments to signal information about reducing risk. Industry and international diversification reduce firm total risk and idiosyncratic risk, respectively.

Bravo, J. M., Ayuso, M., Holzmann, R., & Palmer, E. (2021). Intergenerational Actuarial Fairness When Longevity Increases: Amending the Retirement Age. (pp. 1-41). (CESifo Working Papers; No. 9408). Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research ‐ CESifo GmbH. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3961911 Continuous longevity improvements and population ageing have led countries to modify national public pension schemes by increasing the standard and early retirement ages in a discretionary, scheduled, or automatic way, and by making it harder for people to retire prematurely. To this end, countries have adopted alternative retirement age strategies, but our analyses show that the measures taken are often poorly designed and consequently misaligned with the pension scheme’s ultimate goals. In addition, our analyses demonstrate that countries risk falling short of their goals given their use of projection methods that underestimate life expectancy. This paper discusses how to implement automatic indexation of the retirement age to life expectancy developments while respecting the principles of intergenerational actuarial fairness and neutrality among generations. We show that in policy designs in which extended working lives translate into additional pension entitlements, the pension age must be automatically updated to keep the period in retirement constant. Alternatively, policy designs that pursue a fixed replacement rate are consistent with retirement age policies targeting a constant balance between active years in the workforce and years in retirement. The empirical strategy employed to project the relevant cohort life expectancy uses a Bayesian Model Ensemble approach to stochastic mortality modelling to generate forecasts of intergenerationally and actuarially fair pension ages for 23 countries and regions from 2000 to 2050. The empirical results show that the pension age increases needed to accommodate the effect of longevity developments on pay-as-you-go equilibrium and to reinstate equity between generations are sizeable and well beyond those employed and/or legislated in most countries. A new wave of pension reforms may be at the doorsteps. publishersversion published

The drivers of financial success of the insurance industry are of interest to several players in any economy including the government; policymakers; policyholders; and investors. In Kenya; there have been relatively few studies on this topic; most of which look at narrow elements that determine insurance companies’ performance. This article sought to explore the components contributing to the financial performance of insurance firms. We employed a sample consisting of 37 general insurers and 16 life insurers for the period running from 2009 to 2018 and utilised panel data methods in order to establish the determinants of financial performance of Kenyan insurers. The pooled OLS; fixed effects and random effects models were estimated with the financial performance measures (proxied by either ROA or ROE) as the dependent variables. The results of the study documented that insurer financial performance and size were positively related. The study also found that insurer financial performance was negatively related to the age variable. The study also unraveled that higher leveraged insurance companies performed better than their lowly geared peers. This article provides broad analyses of the various drivers of financial performance of the insurance industry in Kenya. The findings of this study contribute to the academic literature on the financial performance of the insurance sector in Kenya and Africa as a whole. Furthermore; it gives pointers to the management of insurance companies on the aspects of their business that would need greater attention to drive and sustain superior financial performance.

The aim of the article is to identify the risk factors affecting bancassurance development in Poland. The development is understood here as a change of gross written premiums obtained through banks in Poland. The group of risk factors selected in a survey conducted among financial sector employees was subject to statistical verification. The analysis used both variables directly related to the insurance product (e.g., a regulatory restriction of insurance acquisition costs) as well as those resulting from the specificity of the bancassurance channel, such as the sales of banking products, i.e., cash loans, housing loans and the value of funds placed by customers on deposits. The study was conducted on the basis of data on the gross premiums written in Poland in the years 2004–2019. The result of the applied model confirms the assumptions and the importance of insurance distribution in banks. Significant risk factors (statistically significant) which determine gross premiums written in the bancassurance channel are: the size of policyholder’s family (number of children, dependants) represented by the average number of people in a household in Poland, demand on mortgage loans represents by bank housing loans for households and agent’s commission, represented by the ratio of acquisition costs to gross written premium. The results of the econometric model obtained are consistent with expectations arising from the principles and practice of cooperation between banks and insurers as well as the specificity of insurance products distribution (also local) in the bancassurance channel.

This paper provides an ex ante assessment of the effects of the Income Stabilization Tool (IST), a new risk management tool proposed in the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. We investigate the effects of IST on income variability and levels as well as on income inequality in the farming population. We take Italian agriculture as an example as the introduction of IST is currently under discussion there. A rich panel of 2777 farms was studied over a period of 7 years. We use stochastic simulation to derive different income inequality estimates and apply Gini decomposition approaches to assess the distributional implications of IST. We compare the current income situation with that resulting from a hypothetical implementation of IST under different policy scenarios, also accounting for reduced levels of CAP direct payments. We find that IST not only stabilizes farm income but also enhances its level and reduces income inequality in Italian agriculture. IST is more effective in reducing income inequality when farmers pay contributions to mutual funds that are proportional to their income compared to the case of flat rate contributions. Finally, results do not support the hypothesis that the impact of IST will differ if the level of direct payments were to be reduced. Thus, results seem robust enough to accommodate future policy conditions.

Die Leistungen der Pflegeversicherung wurden seit 2017 durch das zweite Pflegestärkungsgesetz ausgeweitet. Weitere Leistungsausweitungen werden diskutiert. Als Beitrag zur Finanzierung wurde ein Finanzausgleich zwischen der privaten und der sozialen Pflegeversicherung vorgeschlagen, um diese zu entlasten. Eine genauere Analyse zeigt jedoch, dass mit irreführenden Zahlen argumentiert wird. Ein Finanzausgleich brächte der sozialen Pflegeversicherung kaum Entlastung und könnte sich sogar zu ihren Ungunsten entwickeln.

We introduce a new method for dynamic clustering of panel data with dynamics for cluster location and shape, cluster composition, and for the number of clusters. Whereas current techniques typically result in (economically) too many switches, our method results in economically more meaningful dynamic clustering patterns. It does so by extending standard cross-sectional clustering techniques using shrinkage towards previous cluster means. In this way, the different cross-sections in the panel are tied together, substantially reducing short-lived switches of units between clusters (flickering) and the birth and death of incidental, economically less meaningful clusters. In a Monte Carlo simulation, we study how to set the penalty parameter in a data-driven way. A systemic risk surveillance example for business model classification in the global insurance industry illustrates how the new method works empirically.

We offer a theory of how the combination of budget constraints and insurance drives up prices. A natural context for our theory is the health care market, where drug prices can be very high. Our model predicts that monopoly prices for orphan drugs are inversely related to the prevalence up until a maximum price. This is supported by empirical evidence in the literature. As a result, prices of drugs sold by a monopoly treating rare serious diseases are doomed to go sky high.

The recent Covid-19 outbreak with significant increase of global uncertainties poses many challenges for financial sectors. Many supervisors took the measures aiming to safeguard resilience of financial institutions by requesting postponements any dividend distributions until uncertainties about further development will be reduced. In this respect, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority issued on Thursday 2nd April 2020 a statement requesting (re)insurers to suspend all discretionary dividend distributions and share buy backs aimed at remunerating shareholders. Although this should have a positive impact on the overall financial stability of the sector, it could also negatively influence insurers' equity prices. Hence, this paper empirically investigates this potential effect using an event study methodology. Despite negative drops were observed in some cases, the obtained empirical results suggest that they were not statistically significant for the overall European insurers' equity market when considering the event windows covering a few days after the statement was published.

Market risks account for an integral part of life insurers' risk profiles. This paper explores the market risk sensitivities of insurers in two large life insurance markets, namely the U.S. and Europe. Based on panel regression models and daily market data from 2012 to 2018, we analyze the reaction of insurers' stock returns to changes in interest rates and CDS spreads of sovereign counterparties. We find that the influence of interest rate movements on stock returns is more than 50% larger for U.S. than for European life insurers. Falling interest rates reduce stock returns in particular for less solvent firms, insurers with a high share of life insurance reserves and unit-linked insurers. Moreover, life insurers' sensitivity to interest rate changes is seven times larger than their sensitivity towards CDS spreads. Only European insurers significantly suffer from rising CDS spreads, whereas U.S. insurers are immunized against increasing sovereign default probabilities.

We analyze efficient risk-sharing arrangements when coalitions may deviate. Coalitions form to insure against idiosyncratic income risk. Self-enforcing contracts for both the original coalition and any deviating coalition rely on a belief in future cooperation which we term \social capital". We treat the contracting conditions of original and deviating coalitions symmetrically and show that higher social capital tightens incentive constraints since it facilitates both the formation of the original as well as a deviating coalition. As a consequence, although social capital facilitates the initial formation of coalitions, the extent of risk sharing in successfully formed coalitions is declining in the extent of social capital and equilibrium allocations might feature resource burning or utility burning: social capital is indeed a double-edged sword.

This paper addresses the problem of approximating the future value distribution of a large and heterogeneous life insurance portfolio which would play a relevant role, for instance, for solvency capital requirement valuations. Based on a metamodel, we first select a subset of representative policies in the portfolio. Then, by using Monte Carlo simulations, we obtain a rough estimate of the policies’ values at the chosen future date and finally we approximate the distribution of a single policy and of the entire portfolio by means of two different approaches, the ordinary least-squares method and a regression method based on the class of generalized beta distribution of the second kind. Extensive numerical experiments are provided to assess the performance of the proposed models.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a market-consistent valuation of life insurance participating liabilities sold to a population of partially heterogeneous customers under the joint impact of biometric and financial risk. In particular, the heterogeneity between groups of policyholders stems from their offered minimum interest rate guarantees and contract maturities. We analyse the effects of these features on the company&rsquo, s insolvency while embracing the insurer&rsquo, s goal to achieve the same expected return for different cohorts of policyholders. Within our extensive numerical analyses, we determine the fair participation rates and other key figures, and discuss the implications for the stakeholders, taking account of various degrees of conservativeness of the insurer when pricing the contracts.

Mit diesem Bericht dokumentiert das Institut für Versicherungswesen (ivwKöln) seine Forschungsaktivitäten des vergangenen Jahres. Wir geben damit gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit und insbesondere den Freunden und Förderern des Instituts Rechenschaft über die geleistete Forschungsarbeit. Darüber hinaus wollen wir in diesem Forschungsbericht auch darlegen, welche Forschungsziele wir am Institut verfolgen und welche Aktivitäten derzeit geplant sind. By this report, the Institute of Insurance Studies documents its research activities of the past year. We render account to the public and to our friends and supporters. We also want to explain the target of our research work and give a short outlook on the planned future activities.

Most studies examining the impact of migrants on crime rates in hosting populations are in the context of economic migrants in developed countries. However, we know much less about the crime impact of refugees in low- and middle-income countries-whose numbers are increasing worldwide. This study examines this issue in the context of the largest refugee group in any country-Syrian refugees in Turkey. Although these refugees are much poorer than the local population, have limited access to formal employment, and face partial mobility restrictions, we find that total crime per person (including natives and refugees) falls due to the arrival of the refugees. This finding also applies to several types of crime; the only exception is smuggling, which increases due to the population influx. We also show that the fall in crime does not result from tighter security; we find no evidence of a change in the number of armed forces (military and civil personnel) in the migrant-hosting regions. We study the role of inattention as a key source of inertia in health plan choices. Our structural model shows that more than 90% of the elderly in Switzerland are inattentive and thus stick to their previous plan. We estimate sizeable switching costs even conditional on attention explaining part of the observed choice persistence. Inattention leads to overspending and generates considerable welfare losses for most consumers. A policy simulation shows that eliminating financially dominated plans from the choice set yields welfare gains for two thirds of individuals.

This study introduces multiplayer game in the modern pension market. Particularly, this study claims that low earners and high earners have different interests when playing in funded pension market scheme. This differentiating is enabled by avoiding the entire society as a single earning cohort. This study using financial position, demonstrates a socio-economic anomaly in the funded pension system, which is in favor of high-earning cohorts at the expense of low-earning cohorts. This anomaly is realized by a lack of insurance and exposure to financial and systemic risks. Furthermore, the anomaly could lead to a pension re-reform back to an unfunded scheme system, due mostly to political pressure. This study found that a minimum pension guarantee is a rebalance mechanism for this anomaly, which increases the probability of a sustainable pension scheme. Nowadays when countries try to balance between social expenses and awaking financial markets, one may find this theory highly relevant. It is obviously one of the cases where social targets meat financial equilibrium and here they are in the same side. Specifically, it is argued that implementing the guarantee with an intra-generational, risk-sharing mechanism is the most efficient way to reduce the effect of this abnormality.

The portfolio rebalancing of Danish pension companies following the introduction of the ECB's asset purchase programmes is studied using a new and unique data set of their financial transactions and holdings since 2015. Due to a long-standing fixed exchange rate regime, Danish pension companies own large amounts of bonds eligible for purchase in ECB's programmes. This allows us to study cross-border spillovers in a fixed exchange rate regime from central banks' asset purchases. We document that pension companies reduced their demand for bonds eligible for ECB's asset purchases and increased their demand for Danish bonds in the first months after the beginning of ECB asset purchases in March 2015. However, the changes in bond demand disappeared after the initial phase of the ECB purchase programmes. We also show that pension companies act differently depending on the type of obligations to their pension plan holders. Companies without strictly binding guarantees to pension plan holders sold German government bonds, but increased their holdings of other bonds eligible for ECB purchases. Companies with strict guarantees to the pension plan holders reduced their demand for bonds eligible for ECB purchases initially, but increased their holdings of these bonds while ECB purchases were still ongoing at a high pace. Overall, our findings show that Danish pension funds, especially those with guaranteed obligations, can be considered having a quasi-preferred habitat in euro.

This study analyses the long- and short-term dynamics of the determinants of insurance penetration for the period 1999Q1 to 2019Q4 in 15 West African countries. The panel auto regressive distributed lag model was used on the quarterly data gathered. A cointegrating and short-run momentous connection was discovered between insurance penetration along with the independent variables, which were education, productivity, dependency, inflation and income. The error correction term’s significance and negative sign demonstrate that all variables are heading towards long-run equilibrium at a moderate speed of 56.4%. This further affirms that education, productivity, dependency, inflation and income determine insurance penetration in West Africa in the long run. In addition, the short-run causality revealed that all the pairs of regressors could jointly cause insurance penetration. The findings of this study recommend that the economy-wide policies by the government and the regulators of insurance markets in these economies should be informed by these significant factors. The restructuring of the education sector to ensure finance-related modules cut across every faculty in the higher education sector is also recommended. Furthermore, Bancassurance is also recommended to boost the easy penetration of the insurance sector using the relationship with the banking sector as a pathway.

We study biased survival expectations across two domains and examine whether such biased expectations influence health and financial behaviors. Combining individual-level longitudinal data, retrospective, and end of life data from several European countries for more than a decade, we estimate time-varying individual level bias in 'survival expectations' (BSE) at the individual level and compare it to biased 'meteorological expectations' (BME). We exploit variation in an individual's family history (parental age at death) to estimate the effect of BSE on health and financial behaviors and compare it to BME, and other tests to discuss whether the effect of BSE results from the effect of private information. We find that BSE increases the probability of adopting less risky behaviors and financial behaviors. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in BSE reduces the average probability of smoking by 48% and holding retirement accounts by 69%. In contrast, BME barely affects healthy behaviors, and is only associated with a change in some financial behaviors.

Historical evidence like the global financial crisis from 2007-09 highlights that sector concentration risk can play an important role for the solvency of insurers. However, current microprudential frameworks like the US RBC framework and Solvency II consider only name concentration risk explicitly in their solvency capital requirements for asset concentration risk and neglect sector concentration risk. We show by means of US insurers' asset holdings from 2009 to 2018 that substantial sectoral asset concentrations exist in the financial, public and real estate sector, and find indicative evidence for a sectoral search for yield behavior. Based on a theoretical solvency capital allocation scheme, we demonstrate that the current regulatory approaches can lead to inappropriate and biased levels of solvency capital for asset concentration risk, and should be revised. Our findings have also important implications on the ongoing discussion of asset concentration risk in the context of macroprudential insurance regulation.

Tail-correlation matrices are an important tool for aggregating risk measurements across risk categories, asset classes and/or business segments. This paper demonstrates that traditional tail-correlation matrices|which are conventionally assumed to have ones on the diagonal|can lead to substantial biases of the aggregate risk measurement's sensitivities with respect to risk exposures. Due to these biases, decision-makers receive an odd view of the effects of portfolio changes and may be unable to identify the optimal portfolio from a risk-return perspective. To overcome these issues, we introduce the "sensitivity-implied tail-correlation matrix". The proposed tail-correlation matrix allows for a simple deterministic risk aggregation approach which reasonably approximates the true aggregate risk measurement according to the complete multivariate risk distribution. Numerical examples demonstrate that our approach is a better basis for portfolio optimization than the Value-at-Risk implied tail-correlation matrix, especially if the calibration portfolio (or current portfolio) deviates from the optimal portfolio. This version: 7th August 2021

When firms approach distress, whether they engage in asset substitution (risk shifting) or rebuild equity (risk management) may depend on their access to capital markets. The property-casualty insurance industry has two features that make it ideal for testing this hypothesis: (1) the main losses for insurers are exogenous events like hurricanes that provide a strong instrument for financial distress; and (2) many insurers are organized as mutual companies, which cannot issue stock. Consistent with the importance of capital constraints, stock companies issue new equity following a negative shock, while mutual companies increase the riskiness of their investment portfolios.

I revisit the question of which motive underlies insurance demand. I draw on the literature of state-dependent utility and on the literature of imperfectly divisible consumption to argue that the general purpose of insurance is not a risk transfer, but meeting a conditional need. In this way, insurance aligns the risk in one's ftnancial endowment with the risk in one's ftnancial needs. This generalization extends the classical view of insurance. I show how this extension greatly simpliftes the generalization of classic results. I also discuss how the novel deftnition has implications for our discipline's research agenda and policy advice