Traditionally, individual states have shared responsibility for regulating the US insurance industry. The Dodd-Frank Act changes this by tasking the Federal Reserve with regulating the systemic risks that particularly large insurance organizations might pose and assigning the regulation of...

Amid the growing financial vulnerabilities posed by climate change, we investigate macroprudential capital buffers to mitigate systemic risks and increase the resilience of the banking sector. Leveraging granular data and state-of-the-art stress testing methods, we quantify potential bank losses...

The paper analyzes the use of credit default swaps (CDS) for regulatory capital relief and its consequences for systemic risk. Equity capital acts as a buffer against losses, and reduces incentives for excessive risk taking. Basel capital regulation states that banks can lower capital...

We examine the systemic risk of 61 SIFIs (i.e., 33 G-SIBs and 28 IAIGs) between 2010 and 2023. We estimate SIFI’s CoVaR using a single index model with LASSO variable selection and construct a set of tail risk network-based systemic risk measures for SIFIs. The results show that two shocks...

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...

Life insurers sell savings contracts with surrender options, allowing policyholders to prematurely withdraw guaranteed surrender values. Surrender options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Hence, higher interest rates raise surrender rates, as we document for the German life...

This paper provides an overview of research and debate over whether insurance poses systemic risk, with a focus on U.S. life insurance. It considers the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) process for designating nonbank financial institutions as systemically important and subject to...

This study shows that the statistical property of the commercial banks' rate of returns can be used to explain the resistance to using Value-at-risk (VaR) and stress tests to determine banks' capital adequacy. We showed that “fat-tail” risk requires more capital than the “normal tail”...

This paper addresses the issue of systemic risk in insurance and investigates how financial markets evaluate the introduction of a new regulation addressed to global systemically important insurers (G-SIIs). We analysed the stock price reactions and the evolution of the distance-to-default of a...