With respect to the insurance sector, Eling and Pankoke (2014) review 43 theoretical and empirical research papers on systemic risk and suggest several other areas of research that would be useful in this field. We build upon and extend the results by Eling and Pankoke (2014) as follows: After a discussion of the term ‘systemic risk' and a review of the extant research results on systemic risk in the insurance sector, we analyse the implications of this discussion for macroprudential supervision. For this purpose, we evaluate the relevance of banking-sector macroprudential instruments to the insurance sector. Moreover, we discuss to what extent systemic risk might be triggered by regulation itself, especially by Solvency II, the forthcoming European-wide regulatory framework for risk-based capital. Finally, in the last section we provide a summary of the points made in this chapter.
Although every company has discontinued business, its active management is a relatively new topic in practice and an entirely new field of study in academia. Based on a survey of 85 non-life insurers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg, we empirically test the market development and find indication that Swiss insurers seem to have more experience with the active management of discontinued business than insurers in other countries. We explain this phenomenon by that country's more advanced solvency capital requirements that better reflect the risk of discontinued business activities. We thus conclude that with the introduction of Solvency II, active management of discontinued business will become more important since insurers will have to hold higher equity capital for discontinued business portfolios. We illustrate this fact within a numerical example which shows that 23 % of the Solvency II non-life premiums and reserve risk can be traced back to discontinued business.
Wir vergleichen die Ausgestaltung des deutschen Aufsichtsrats und des schweizerischen Verwaltungsrats und die besonderen Regelungen für Versicherer in diesen beiden Ländern. Die Regulierung beider Gremien ist ähnlich, wobei das Mandat des Verwaltungsrats grundsätzlich umfangreicher ist als das des Aufsichtsrats. Schweizer Richtlinien haben meist einen weniger bindenden Charakter als die deutschen und lassen dem Versicherungsunternehmen mehr Freiraum. Wir nehmen eine Evaluation der Regulierung anhand wissenschaftlicher Studien vor und schlussfolgern, dass die Schweizer Regulierung passgenauer und effektiver erscheint. Des Weiteren vergleichen wir die Regulierung der Aufsichtsgremien von Versicherungsunternehmen je nach Rechtsform. In beiden Ländern ist die Regulierung für börsenkotierte Aktiengesellschaften am meisten ausgeprägt, wobei die Unterschiede generell eher gering sind.
We empirically analyze the costs and benefits of financial regulation based on a survey of 76 insurers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Our analysis includes both established and new empirical measures for regulatory costs and benefits. This is the first paper that tries to take costs and benefits combined into account using a latent class regression with covariates. Another feature of this paper is that it analyzes regulatory costs and benefits not only on an industry level, but also at the company level. This allows us to empirically test fundamental principles of financial regulation such as proportionality: the intensity of regulation should reflect the firm-specific amount and complexity of the risk taken. Our empirical findings do not support the proportionality principle; for example, regulatory costs cannot be explained by differences in business complexity. One potential policy implication is that the proportionality principle needs to be more carefully applied to financial regulation.
This paper analyzes the equity risk module of Solvency II, the new regulatory framework in the European Union. The equity risk module contains a symmetric adjustment mechanism called equity dampener which shall reduce procyclicality of capital requirements and thus systemic risk in the insurance sector. We critically review the equity risk module in three steps: we first analyze the sensitivities of the equity risk module with respect to the underlying technical basis, then work out potential basis risk (i.e., deviations of the insurers actual equity risk from the Solvency II equity risk), and-based on these results-measure the impact of the symmetric adjustment mechanism on the goals of Solvency II. The equity risk module is backward looking in nature and a substantial basis risk exists if realistic equity portfolios of insurers are considered. Both results underline the importance of the own risk and solvency assessment (ORSA) under Solvency II. Moreover, we show that the equity dampener leads to substantial deviations from the proposed 99.5% confidence level and thereby reduce procyclicality of capital requirements. Our results are helpful for academics interested in regulation and risk management as well as for practitioners and regulators working on the implementation of such models.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of both firm-specific and external factors on the risk taking of European insurance companies. The extent of risk taking is quantified through variations in stock prices and these are explained by firm-specific and external factors that proxy the environment in which the insurers are active. Using a two-way panel regression analysis with fixed and random effects, our empirical study covers hand-collected data on 35 German and UK insurance companies for the period 1997 to 2010. We find that differences in company size, capital structure, liquidity, and economic development affect variations in stock prices. The analysis also highlights differences between the market-based UK corporate governance system and the control-based regime implemented in Germany, with the UK exhibiting a higher level of risk, compensation, and board independence. We also document increases in the volatility of insurance stock returns during the financial crisis..
The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of underwriting cycles on the risk and return of non-life insurance companies. We integrate underwriting cycles in a dynamic financial analysis framework using a stochastic process, specifically, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, which is fitted to empirical data and used to analyze the impact of these cycles on risk and return. We find that underwriting cycles have a substantial influence on risk and return measures. Our results have implications for managers, regulators, and rating agencies that use such models in risk management, e.g., to determine risk-based capital requirements.
