This paper empirically investigates if insurers exhibited a flight home or flight to quality during the European sovereign debt crisis and other stages of the financial crisis. Our dataset consists of over sixty insurance companies, for which we separately observe trading behaviour and portfolio...

This paper analyses investment strategies of three types of institutional investors pension funds, life insurers and non-life insurers over the period 1999-2005. We use balance sheet and cash flow data, including purchases and sales of equity, fixed income and real estate. We trace asset...

This paper is the first that formally compares investment risk taking by pension funds and insurance firms. Using a unique and extended dataset that covers the volatile investment period 1995-2009, we find that, in the Netherlands, insurers take substantially less investment risk than pension...

This paper empirically investigates international equity investors' foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries. The results show that international stock market diversification provides large gains during the...

Abstract We consider three measures on the systemic importance of a financial institu- tion within a interconnected financial system. Based on the measures, we study the relation between the size of a financial institution and its systemic importance. From both theo- retical model and empirical...

Empirical research on contagion between international stock markets generally focuses on market returns converted to US dollars, as this would be consistent with the perspective of an international investor. This note argues that such a conversion is inappropriate, since only returns denominated...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a red herring&; once one corrects for the endogeneity of natural resource exports and allows resource abundance to have an effect on growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer...

By proposing a measure for cross-market rebalancing effects, we provide new insights into the different sources of currency crises. We address three interrelated questions: (i) How can we best capture contagion; (ii) Is the contagion of currency crisis a regional or global phenomenon?; and (iii)...

In this paper, we analyze the business cycle behavior of home mortgages and consumer credit and investigate whether the observed changes. and in particular observed changes in the comovement between the loan variables and real activity. are likely to be caused by changes in financial markets. We...

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to...