Deregulation and widespread economic changes have fundamentally affected the business environment of European life insurance companies over the last decades. We apply multi-stage data envelopment analysis to identify the impact of the changing environment on productivity and efficiency of European life insurance companies. Considering a sample of 970 life insurance companies from 14 European countries, we show that general economic, capital market, and insurance market conditions are important drivers of efficiency. Although we find no technical change in the European life insurance sector, we nonetheless observe an efficiency increase in 2002–2013 that leads to an increase in total factor productivity; these trends can be explained by more challenging business conditions in the 2000s. Our results emphasize the need to control for the business environment in cross-country efficiency studies.
As early as the 1970s, European Union (EU) member countries implemented rules to coordinate insurance markets and regulation. However, with the more recent movement toward a general single EU market, financial services regulation has taken on new meaning and priority. Solvency I regulations went into effect for member nations by January 2004. The creation of risk-based capital standards, the main focus of Solvency II, now appears likely sometime after 2007. The purpose of the discussion presented here is to outline the specifics of Solvency II as they currently stand and provide input to evaluation process that, ultimately, will determine the exact form of capital regulation. Our analysis leads us to conclude that caution is warranted.
Derzeit wird im Versicherungssektor intensiv über eine fundamentale Reform der Versicherungsaufsicht diskutiert. Ausgangspunkt ist die Kritik an den aktuellen EU-Solvabilitätsvorschriften, die nur sehr eingeschränkt auf ökonomischen Überlegungen fussen. Vielmehr sind diese vor allem anhand des politisch motivierten, europaweiten Einigungsprozesses im Rahmen der Verabschiedung der Solvabilitätsregeln im Jahr 1973 (für Nichtlebensversicherungsunternehmen) und 1979 (für Lebensversicherungsunternehmen) zu erklären.
Although the insurance industry is less affected than the banking industry, the credit crisis has revealed room for improvement in its risk management and supervision. Based on this observation, we formulate ten consequences for risk management and insurance regulation. Many of these reflect current discussions in academia and practice, but we also add a number of new ideas that have not yet been the focus of discussion. Among these are specific aspects of agency and portfolio theory, a concept for a controlled run-off for insolvent insurers, new principles in stress testing, improved communication aspects, market discipline, and accountability. Another contribution of this paper is to embed the current practitioners' discussion in the recent academic literature, for example, with regard to the regulation of financial conglomerates.
Die von Investmentgesellschaften durch den Verkauf von Produkten mit integrierter finanzwirtschaftlicher Garantie eingegangenen Verpflichtungen sollten im Sinne eines "true and fair view" bilanziell adäquat erfasst werden. Wir ermitteln anhand zweier aktueller Investmentprodukte den Fair Value der gegebenen finanzwirtschaftlichen Garantie und zeigen die bilanziellen Konsequenzen gemäss den Regelungen der International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) auf. Da Marktpreise für die in Rede stehenden Garantien im Allgemeinen nicht existieren, folgen wir dem Mark-to-Model-Ansatz, welcher die Verwendung eines theoriegestützten Bewertungsverfahrens vorsieht. Für die in der Arbeit betrachteten Produkte wird beispielhaft eine Bewertung anhand eines (verallgemeinerten) Black/Scholes-Modells vorgenommen
