The Distributions of Policy Reserves Considering the Policy-Year Structures of Surrender Rates and Expense Ratios

In this article, we examine how the policy-year structures of expense ratios and surrender rates affect the distributions of policy reserves. Our results show that a convex expense ratio curve, though reduces the mean and the uncertainty of reserves, could make the beneficial impact of surrenders on insurers become detrimental. Our results also show that the convexity of the surrender rate curve is favorable to insurers while the volatilities of surrender rates are unfavorable. We further find that neglecting the policy-year structures of surrender rates and expense ratios may result in overestimation of the mean and the uncertainty of reserves.     

The Term Structure of Reserve Durations and the Duration of Aggregate Reserves

Estimating the duration gap of a life insurer demands the knowledge on the durations of liabilities and assets. The literature analyzed the durations of assets extensively but rendered limited analyses on the durations of insurance liabilities. This article calculated the reserve durations for individual policies and estimated the duration of the aggregate reserves. The results showed that the duration of the policy reserve might be negative and/or have a large figure. They further revealed an interesting pattern of the reserve duration with respect to the policy's time to maturity. A term structure with abnormal durations, however, does not result in an abnormal duration of the aggregate reserves.     

Interest on bank reserves and optimal sweeping

A key rationale offered by the Federal Reserve for the payment of interest on reserves was to remove the incentive for banks to operate sweep accounts. Sweeping shifts funds from transactions deposits subject to reserve requirements to non-reservable deposits. This paper extends a conventional banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or exogenous increases in bank equity. Sweeping generates greater responsiveness in lending to changes in loan rates or the interest rate on reserves and lower responsiveness to changes in reserve ratios or equity than in its absence. Empirical analysis of an explicit condition that we derive suggests that, with an unchanged reserve requirement, the Fed could eliminate sweeping by setting the interest rate on reserves to no less than approximately 4% points below the market loan rate.     

International reserves and global interest rates

In this paper we study the relationship between foreign currency international reserve holdings and global interest rates. To guide empirical work we solve a simple, small open-economy model with money, where the central bank manages international reserves to smooth inflation over time. This model shows that changes in interest rates are positively related to the target level of reserves. As a consequence interest rate hikes increase reserve transfers, defined as the change in international reserves net of the interest earned on reserves. Using quarterly data for 75 countries between 2000 and 2013, we document a positive relationship between interest-rate changes and reserve transfers as a share of GDP, that is consistent with the model.     

Fair valuation of cliquet-style return guarantees in (homogeneous and) heterogeneous life insurance portfolios

Participating life insurance contracts allow the policyholder to participate in the annual return of a reference portfolio. Additionally, they are often equipped with an annual (cliquet-style) return guarantee. The current low interest rate environment has again refreshed the discussion on risk management and fair valuation of such embedded options. While this problem is typically discussed from the viewpoint of a single contract or a homogeneous* insurance portfolio, contracts are, in practice, managed within a heterogeneous insurance portfolio. Their valuation must then – unlike the case of asset portfolios – take account of portfolio effects: Their premiums are invested in the same reference portfolio; the contracts interact by a joint reserve, individual surrender options and joint default risk of the policy sponsor. Here, we discuss the impact of portfolio effects on the fair valuation of insurance contracts jointly managed in (homogeneous and) heterogeneous life insurance portfolios. First, in a rather general setting, including stochastic interest rates, we consider the case that otherwise homogeneous contracts interact due to the default risk of the policy sponsor. Second, and more importantly, we then also consider the case when policies are allowed to differ in further aspects like the guaranteed rate or time to maturity. We also provide an extensive numerical example for further analysis.     

Payment obligations,reserve requirements,and the demand for central bank balances

We develop a model in which a bank's demand for reserves depends on the joint distribution of transactions, reserve requirements, and the interest rate. By devoting resources to its liquidity management, a bank can save on costly reserves required to settle its payments on time. We test the model with data from the largest banks in the Swiss Interbank Clearing system. We find that the turnover ratio (the speed with which a bank turns over its reserves in the payment system) depends largely on the aggregate value of its payments. We also find that reserve requirements impose a highly uneven burden on the banks.     

Foreign reserve management during the global financial crisis

This paper examines how countries managed their foreign currency reserves during the global financial crisis. Evidence based on changes in reserve stocks suggests that many governments, even those with high levels of pre-crisis reserves, were reluctant to use them during the crisis. As a consequence, a number of recent studies of cross-country experiences during the crisis find little evidence of a positive role for reserves in macroeconomic crisis-management. This paper examines whether this assessment of the non-role of reserves during the crisis is justified. While the reserve stock data indicates stable reserve levels for many countries during the crisis, distinguishing between reserve changes that occurred due to interest income and valuation changes on existing assets and asset purchases and sales, indicates that many emerging economies actively depleted reserves. Further, the data indicate that countries whose pre-crisis reserve levels were in excess of what can be explained by standard models of reserve accumulation were the most likely to sell reserve assets during the crisis.     

Why Commercial Banks Held Excess Reserves: The Japanese Experience of the Late 1990s

We investigated, empirically, why Japanese banks held excess reserves in the late 1990s. Specifically, we pin down two factors explaining the demand for excess reserves: a low short-term interest rate, or call rate, and the fragile financial health of banks. The virtually zero call rate increased the demand for excess reserves substantially, and a high bad loans ratio largely contributed to the increase in excess reserve holdings. We found that the holdings of excess reserves would fall by two-thirds if the call rate were to be raised to its level prior to the adoption of the zero-interest-rate policy, and the bad loans ratio were to fall by 50%.     

Financial capital movements and central bank behavior in a two-country,short-run portfolio balance model

This paper analyzes financial capital movements in a two-country, short-run, portfolio balance model which includes two securities that are imperfect substitutes. Following a disturbance, equilibrium is, in general, reattained, but the effects on interest rates, money supplies, and international reserve holdings depend on the monetary and reserve asset management policies of the two central banks. Special attention is focused on the case in which one central bank holds its international reserves in the form of ‘key currency’ securities, thereby sterilizing for the ‘key currency’ country. There are several applications of the central result that, for any disturbance, the less changes in international reserves are allowed to affect money supplies, the larger the change in reserves required to reestablish equilibrium.     

Reserve overstocking in a highly integrated world. New evidence from Asia and Latin America†

Monthly data are used to investigate reserves management in eight Asian and Latin American countries. Idiosyncratic explanatory variables enter into co-integration relationships based on a stochastic buffer stock model, where a reserve variability measure is obtained via conditional variance approaches. International factors influence the co-integration residuals (representing the excess demands for reserves), which tend to co-move within and across geographical areas. Principal components analysis is then implemented to associate their common drivers with the US fed fund effective interest rate and real-effective exchange rate. This two-step approach sheds light on some controversial aspects of reserves and exchange rate management, such as ‘fear of floating’ and mercantilist behavior. Our results suggest that the size of recent excess reserve holdings is probably overstated.     

Insurer Reserve Error and Executive Compensation

This article investigates incentives of insurance firm managers to manipulate loss reserves in order to maximize their compensation. We find that managers who receive bonuses that are likely capped or no bonuses tend to over‐reserve for current‐year incurred losses. However, managers who receive bonuses that are likely not capped tend to under‐reserve for current‐year incurred losses. We also find that managers who exercise stock options tend to under‐reserve in the current period.     

我国外汇储备货币组合的实证分析

截至2006年2月我国外汇储备达8536亿美元,超过日本成为世界外汇储备持有量第一大国,其后我国外汇储备也呈不断增长的态势,到2007年3月已达12020.31亿美元.外汇储备的持续增加意味着面临的风险也在持续增加.因此,如何确定合理的外汇储备币种组合成为目前需要迫切研究的课题.本文根据国内外已有研究确定了外汇储备货币结构的影响因素,结合因子分析法,得出了我国外汇储备币种组合的新选择,提出了我国外汇储备货币组合的对策建议.     

A Finite Difference Approach to the Valuation of Path Dependent Life Insurance Liabilities

This paper sets up a model for the valuation of traditional participating life insurance policies. These claims are characterized by their explicit interest rate guarantees and by various embedded option elements, such as bonus and surrender options. Owing to the structure of these contracts, the theory of contingent claims pricing is a particularly well-suited framework for the analysis of their valuation.The eventual benefits (or pay-offs) from the contracts considered crucially depend on the history of returns on the insurance company's assets during the contract period. This path-dependence prohibits the derivation of closed-form valuation formulas but we demonstrate that the dimensionality of the problem can be reduced to allow for the development and implementation of a finite difference algorithm for fast and accurate numerical evaluation of the contracts. We also demonstrate how the fundamental financial model can be extended to allow for mortality risk and we provide a wide range of numerical pricing results.     

Stochastic reserve losses and bank credit expansion

This paper addresses the issue of bank credit expansion when reserve and deposit flows are stochastic. For a risk-neutral bank able to lend and borrow at fixed interest rates, and incurring a lump sum transaction cost when short of reserves, it is found that if deposit flows are normally distributed — essentially the Orr-Mellon model — the distribution of new reserves among banks does not affect credit expansion. An explanation for this counter-intuitive result is given by establishing a parallel between the model and the literature on portfolio theory. The implications for credit expansion of more general assumptions is discussed.     

终身寿险退保的利率敏感性分析——基于保单保障水平的测算

市场利率变化对于不分红终身寿险产品退保的影响很大,终身寿险保单不能够通过选择较长的缴费期来缓解市场利率变化引起的退保压力,调整预定利率能缓解退保压力;适当的分红政策能够大大缓解市场利率变化对分红型终身寿险退保的影响,但是经营效益差,分红水平低于市场预期的寿险公司产品可能会遭遇到更大的退保压力。     

Interest rate corridors and reserves

This paper evaluates reserves regimes versus interest rate corridors, which have become competing frameworks for monetary policy implementation. Rate corridors, relying on lending and deposit facilities to create ceilings and floors for overnight interest rates, evince mixed results on controlling volatility. Reserve requirements allow period-average smoothing of interest rates but, even if remunerated, are subject to reserve avoidance activities. A system of voluntary, period-average reserve commitments could offer equivalent rate-smoothing advantages. If central banks created symmetric opportunity costs of meeting or falling short of period-average reserve requirements (or commitments), they could achieve flat reserve demand on settlement day.     

The Over‐the‐Counter Theory of the Fed Funds Market: A Primer

We present a dynamic over‐the‐counter model of the fed funds market and use it to study the determination of the fed funds rate, the volume of loans traded, and the intraday evolution of the distribution of reserve balances across banks. We also investigate the implications of changes in the market structure, as well as the effects of central bank policy instruments such as open market operations, the discount window lending rate, and the interest rate on bank reserves.     

基于格兰杰因果关系检验的我国银行保险退保因素分析

我国银行保险内存不足。通过格兰杰因果关系检验对“财务危机”和“利率替代”两种假说进行实证检验后得出：短期利率波动对银行保险退保影响不显著,长期利率波动对银行保险退保影响较显著,失业对银行保险退保短期影响较显著,证券投资波动对银行保险退保影响最为显著。为了降低我国银行保险的退保率,要深化银保合作机制,为了降低市场因素带来的影响,可适当提高银保产品的收益率,银保产品不要过于理财化,可适当增加一些保障功能。     

Banks’ reserve management,transaction costs,and the timing of Federal Reserve intervention

We use daily data on bank reserves and overnight interest rates to document a striking pattern in the high-frequency behavior of the US market for federal funds: depository institutions tend to hold more reserves during the last few days of each “reserve maintenance period”, when the opportunity cost of holding reserves is typically highest. We then propose and analyze a model of the federal funds market where uncertain liquidity flows and transaction costs induce banks to delay trading and to bid up interest rates at the end of each maintenance period. In this context, the central bank’s interest-rate-smoothing policy causes a high supply of liquid funds to be associated with high interest rates around reserve-settlement days.