Analysis of Systemic Risk in the Insurance Industry

In this paper, we discuss the systemic relevance of the insurance sector. Systemic risk is defined as the propensity of a financial institution to be undercapitalised when the financial system as a whole is undercapitalised. By the law of large numbers, traditional lines of insurance with idiosyncratic non-catastrophic risks cannot be systemic. On the contrary, undiversified insurers specialised in activities whose insured risks are highly correlated with GDP are systemic. In the life insurance sector, some contractual clauses such as unhedged minimum guarantees and free options to surrender raise the chance of systemic relevance. On the contrary, life insurers satisfying the classic solvency capital requirements contribute to the liquidity of financial markets thanks to the long-termist approach of their portfolio management. Finally, using historical data in the U.S. on the contribution of different sectors to the aggregate volatility of the economy, we show that investment banking is almost twice as volatile as aggregate GDP, while insurance is one fifth as volatile as aggregate GDP. The insurance sector thus appears to be a stabilising force of the economy.     

Curbing systemic risk in the insurance sector: A mission impossible?

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 sample of 44 of the world's largest insurers to the publication of the first list of 9 G-SIIs and the release of information regarding their new capital requirements and other policy measures. The results of our event study suggest that, overall, investors doubt the effectiveness of the new regulatory framework in reducing systemic risk in the insurance sector and curbing the moral hazard implications of a “too systemic to fail” policy.     

Systemic Risk,Financial Crisis,and Credit Risk Insurance

Differing from conventional insurance firms whose underwriting business does not contribute to systemic risk, credit risk insurance companies providing credit protections for debt obligations are exposed to systemic risk. We show that credit risk insurers (CRIs) underperformed conventional insurance companies during the 2007–2009 financial crisis, and such underperformance is attributed to the greater systemic risk of CRIs. We also find that the credit spreads of insured bonds increase significantly after their insurers are downgraded or put in the negative watch list. We control for alternative factors affecting bond credit spreads and the result is robust.     

Systemic Risk in the Insurance Sector: A Review and Directions for Future Research

This article reviews the extant research on systemic risk in the insurance sector and outlines new areas of research in this field. We summarize and classify 48 theoretical and empirical research papers from both academia and practitioner organizations. The survey reveals that traditional insurance activity in the life, nonlife, and reinsurance sectors neither contributes to systemic risk nor increases insurers’ vulnerability to impairments of the financial system. However, nontraditional activities (e.g., credit default swap underwriting) might increase vulnerability, and life insurers might be more vulnerable than nonlife insurers due to higher leverage. Whether nontraditional activities also contribute to systemic risk is not entirely clear; however, the activities with the potential to contribute to systemic risk include underwriting financial derivatives and providing financial guarantees. This article is not only likely of interest to academics but also highly relevant for the industry, regulators, and policymakers.     

Engineered nanomaterials: risk perception,regulation and insurance

Concerns surrounding the health risk of engineered nanomaterials, effective regulation and the lack of specifically tailored insurance products for the nanotechnology sector are putting the industry’s long-term economic viability at risk. From the perspective of the underwriter, this article speculates on the relationship between risk perception, regulation and insurability. In the nanotechnology sector, regulators are currently failing to keep pace with innovation, and insurers generally lack guiding principles for underwriting occupational risk from nanomaterial exposure. Such vulnerabilities when combined with misguided risk perceptions can lead to the overpricing of risk transfer and ill-conceived regulatory initiatives, thus potentially exhausting resources and stifling innovation in the sector. In the absence of well-developed regulatory protocols, the insurance industry has, and will continue, to occupy a key role as an effective lobby in terms of improved risk management practice. We suggest that the insurance industry will increasingly rely on control banding frameworks and ‘risk mitigation at source’ methods developed in conjunction with their clients to manage severe acute diversifiable risks. Long tail risk will continue to represent a serious challenge to insurers and regulators. In the meantime, insurers will have to bridge their current needs with improvised solutions. As an example of one possible solution, we outline a framework that utilizes financial instruments to hedge an insurer’s exposure to uncertain estimates of these long-term risks.     

中国的“影子保险”:来自监管自然实验的证据

影子保险在金融稳定中扮演着重要角色,但现有文献较多关注影子银行,对影子保险关注不足。“影子保险”即保险公司通过再保险方式将保险业务转移给不受监管或者受监管较弱的关联企业的活动,这会推高其真实的杠杆水平,增加金融体系脆弱性。然而,由于影子保险的不透明性和缺少自然实验,现有研究仅基于有限数据或模型给出简单的特征事实或结构性估计,很少能从因果关系上清楚地识别影子保险活动及其机制。本文利用中国加强对中资保险公司(处理组)再保险关联交易监管的政策冲击这一自然实验,使用微观数据和双重差分方法,识别了中国金融体系中的影子保险活动。研究发现,相关监管有效降低了影子保险活动,这一效应对集团公司的影响尤为显著;在机制方面,相关监管通过影响中资保险公司资产负债表两端的结构性调整进而降低了其风险承担行为,提高了经营稳定性。本文方法对识别金融机构的监管套利和防范系统性金融风险具有一定参考意义。     

Short-term wholesale funding and systemic risk: A global CoVaR approach

We use the CoVaR approach to identify the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of large international banks. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find weaker evidence that either size or leverage contributes to systemic risk within the class of large international banks. We also show that asymmetries based on the sign of bank returns play an important role in capturing the sensitivity of system-wide risk to individual bank returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee’s proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.     

Systemic risk and diversification across European banks and insurers

The mutual and cross company exposures to fat-tail distributed risks determine the potential impact of a financial crisis on banks and insurers. We examine the systemic interdependencies within and across the European banking and insurance sectors during times of stress by means of extreme value analysis. While insurers exhibit a slightly higher interdependency in comparison with banks, the interdependency across the two sectors turns out to be considerably lower. This suggests that downside risk can be lowered through financial conglomeration.     

Systemic risk and bank consolidation: International evidence

This paper analyzes the systemic risk effects of bank mergers to test the “concentration-fragility” hypothesis. We use the marginal expected shortfall as well as the lower tail dependence between a bank’s stock returns and a relevant bank sector index to capture the merger-related change in an acquirer’s contribution to systemic risk. In our empirical analysis of a dataset of international domestic and cross-border mergers, we find clear evidence for a significant increase in the merging banks’, the combined banks’ as well as their competitors’ contribution to systemic risk following mergers, thus confirming the “concentration-fragility” hypothesis.     

An empirical assessment of reinsurance risk

We analyse the effect of failing reinsurance cover on the stability of Dutch insurers. As insurers often reinsure themselves with other (re)insurers, a firm's loss could spread contagiously through the sector. Using a unique and confidential data set on reinsurance exposures, we gain insight into the reinsurance market structure and perform a scenario analysis to measure contagion risks. Considering entities on a standalone basis, we find no evidence of systemic risk in the Netherlands, even if multiple reinsurance companies fail simultaneously. At group level our analysis points to the contagion risk of in-house reinsurance structures, given that such in-house reinsurance parties are generally not higher capitalised than other group members.     

The Financial Crisis, Systemic Risk, and the Future of Insurance Regulation

This article considers the role of American International Group (AIG) and the insurance sector in the 2007–2009 financial crisis and the implications for insurance regulation. Following an overview of the causes of the crisis, I explore the events and policies that contributed to federal government intervention to prevent bankruptcy of AIG and the scope of federal assistance to AIG. I discuss the extent to which insurance in general poses systemic risk and whether a systemic risk regulator is desirable for insurers or other nonbank financial institutions. The last two sections of the article address the financial crisis's implications for proposed optional and/or mandatory federal chartering and regulation of insurers and for insurance regulation in general.     

Assessing the contribution of banks,insurance and other financial services to systemic risk

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on systemic risk by assessing the extent to which distress within the main different financial sectors, namely, the banking, insurance and other financial services industries contribute to systemic risk. To this end, we rely on the $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathit{CoVaR}$ systemic risk measure introduced by Adrian and Brunnermeier (2011). In order to provide a formal ranking of the financial sectors with respect to their contribution to systemic risk, the original $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathit{CoVaR}$ approach is extended here to include the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test developed by Abadie (2002), based on bootstrapping. Our empirical results reveal that in the Eurozone, for the period ranging from 2004 to 2012, the other financial services sector contributes relatively the most to systemic risk at times of distress affecting this sector. In turn, the banking sector appears to contribute more to systemic risk than the insurance sector. By contrast, the insurance industry is the systemically riskiest financial sector in the United States for the same period, while the banking sector contributes the least to systemic risk in this area. Beyond this ranking, the three financial sectors of interest are found to contribute significantly to systemic risk, both in the Eurozone and in the United States.     

Foreign exchange exposure: Evidence from the U.S. insurance industry

We study the foreign exchange exposure of U.S. insurers. The evidence shows that no systematic difference exists in the currency risk profiles of life and non-life segments within the insurance industry. This suggests that life and non-life insurers have similar risk exposure management strategies arising from similar risk pooling and financial intermediary functions. The empirical results reveal that a sizable proportion of U.S. insurers are exposed to foreign exchange movements against the seven largest U.S. trade partners in insurance services (U.K., Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Germany and Canada). Significant operational and size effects are also documented and we find that the frequency of foreign exchange exposure increases with time horizon.     

Systemic Risk Contributions

We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks’ marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S. Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), with the systemic risk indicator peaking around $1.1 trillion in March 2009. Our systemic risk contribution measure shows interesting similarity to and divergence from the SCAP loss estimates under stress test scenarios. In general, we find that a bank’s contribution to the systemic risk is roughly linear in its default probability but highly nonlinear with respect to institution size and asset correlation.     

A comprehensive approach to measuring the relation between systemic risk exposure and sovereign debt

Using an integrated model to control for simultaneity, as well as new risk measurement techniques such as Adapted Exposure CoVaR and Marginal Expected Shortfall (MES), we show that the aggregate systemic risk exposure of financial institutions is positively related to sovereign debt yields in European countries in an episodic manner, varying positively with the intensity of the financial crisis facing a particular nation. We find evidence of a simultaneous relation between systemic risk exposure and sovereign debt yields. This suggests that models of sovereign debt yields should also include the systemic risk of a country's financial system in order to avoid potentially important mis-specification errors. We find evidence that systemic risk of a country's financial institutions and the risk of sovereign governments are inter-related and shocks to these domestic linkages are stronger and longer lasting than international risk spillovers. Thus, the channel in which domestic sovereign debt yields can be affected by another nation's sovereign debt is mostly an indirect one in that shocks to a foreign country's government finances are transmitted to that country's financial system which, in turn, can spill over to the domestic financial system and, ultimately, have a destabilizing effect on the domestic sovereign debt market.     

Does operating risk affect portfolio risk? Evidence from insurers' securities holding

This study empirically examines, in the setting of insurance companies, the hypothesis that investors facing more operating risk may behave as if they were more risk averse in investment decisions. Specifically, we study how operating risk from underwriting insurance policies affects insurers' risk taking behavior in their portfolio investments. We find that insurers with higher volatilities in underwriting incomes and cash flows are more conservative in their financial investment risk taking – they have lower credit risk exposure in their bond investments, as well as lower portfolio weights on risky bonds and equities. Further, insurers' portfolio risk exposure is sensitive to the risk of permanent underwriting income shocks but insensitive to the risk of transitory shocks. Transitory operating risk, however, is significantly related to portfolio risk when insurers face tight financing constraints. Our findings suggest a substitutive effect of operating risk on investment decisions by financial institutions.     

Systemic risk contribution of banks and non-bank financial institutions across frequencies: The Australian experience

The Australian financial sector (AFS) is highly concentrated and interconnected. Besides, Australian banks' lending portfolios are dominated by residential mortgage loans, and 70% of insurance companies' revenues arise from non-policyholder sources. The AFS also performed relatively well during the global financial crisis (GFC). Given these distinctive features, in this paper, we examine the systemic risk contribution of Australian banks, insurance companies, and other financial services providers. We use a flexible copula-based delta conditional value-at-risk (ΔCoVaR) method across different frequencies. Further, we study the systemic risk determinants in a panel setting. We find that the major Australian banks are systemically more important than all other financial institutions. Systemic risk is typically higher after the GFC than in the pre-crisis period, despite the introduction of more stringent capital requirements. In addition, the short-term ΔCoVaR is significantly higher than the medium- and long-term ΔCoVaRs. Finally, institution-specific characteristics and market-wide variables explain the cross-sectional and time-series variation in systemic risk, and their explanatory power varies across frequencies.     

Organizational structure,risk-based capital requirements,and the sales of downgraded bonds

Using bond downgrades as external shocks to life insurers’ asset risk, we document several findings of the impact of organizational structure and risk factors on investment risk taking. First, we find that mutual insurers and widely-held stock insurers are more likely to sell downgraded bonds than are closely-held stock insurers. Second, we find evidence that insurers are less likely to sell downgraded bonds that remain in the same rating class than bonds downgraded to a lower rating class. The result implies that insurers sell downgraded bonds mainly because of additional capital charge is imposed, not because of downgrade itself. In other words, risk factors in risk-based capital regulation do matter on life insurers’ investment risk taking. Finally, we find that life insurers might be reluctant to sell downgraded bonds at fire-sale prices during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.     

Measuring systemic importance of financial institutions: An extreme value theory approach

This paper proposes a set of market-based measures on the systemic importance of a financial institution or a group of financial institutions, each designed to capture different aspects of systemic importance of financial institutions. Multivariate extreme value theory approach is used to estimate these measures. Using six big Canadian banks as the proxy for Canadian banking sector, we apply these measures to identify systemically important banks in Canadian banking sector and major risk contributors from international financial institutions to Canadian banking sector. The empirical evidence reveals that (i) the top three banks, RBC Financial Group, TD Bank Financial Group, and Scotiabank, are more systemically important than other banks, while we also find that the size of a financial institution should not be considered as a proxy of systemic importance; (ii) compared to the European and Asian banks, the crashes of the U.S. banks, on average, are the most damaging to Canadian banking sector, while the risk contribution to the Canadian banking sector from Asian banks is quite lower than that from banks in the U.S. and euro area; (iii) the risk contribution to Canadian banking sector exhibits “home bias”, that is, cross-country risk contribution tends to be smaller than domestic risk contribution.     

The systemic risk of European banks during the financial and sovereign debt crises

European banks became a source of risk to global financial markets during the financial crisis and attention to the European banking sector increased during the sovereign debt crisis. To measure the systemic risk of European banks, we calculate a distress insurance premium (DIP), which integrates the characteristics of bank size, probability of default, and correlation. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around €500 billion. We find that this was largely due to sovereign default risk. The DIP methodology is also used to measure the systemic contribution of individual banks. This approach identifies the large systemically important European banks, but Italian and Spanish banks as a group notably increased in systemic importance during the sample period. Bank-specific fundamentals like capital-asset ratios predict the one-year-ahead systemic risk contributions.