Price Regulation in Property-Liability Insurance: A Contingent-Claims Approach

A discrete-time option-pricing model is used to derive the “fair” rate of return for the property-liability insurance firm. The rationale for the use of this model is that the financial claims of shareholders, policyholders, and tax authorities can be modeled as European options written on the income generated by the insurer's asset portfolio. This portfolio consists mostly of traded financial assets and is therefore relatively easy to value. By setting the value of the shareholders' option equal to the initial surplus, an implicit solution for the fair insurance price may be derived. Unlike previous insurance regulatory models, this approach addresses the ruin probability of the insurer, as well as nonlinear tax effects.     

Solvency, Capital Allocation, and Fair Rate of Return in Insurance

In this article, we consider the links between solvency, capital allocation, and fair rate of return in insurance. A method to allocate capital in insurance to lines of business is developed based on an economic definition of solvency and the market value of the insurer balance sheet. Solvency, and its financial impact, is determined by the value of the insolvency exchange option. The allocation of capital is determined using a complete markets’ arbitrage‐free model and, as a result, has desirable properties, such as the allocated capital “adds up” and is consistent with the economic value of the balance sheet assets and liabilities. A single‐period discrete‐state model example is used to illustrate the results. The impact of adding lines of business is briefly considered.     

New Risk-Based Capital Standards in the European Union: A Proposal Based on Empirical Data

In response to criticism concerning the current solvency system, the European Commission is developing new rules for insurance companies operating in the member states of the European Union (EU). Under this so-called Solvency II concept, an insurer is allowed to verify its solvency by using an internal risk management model previously approved by the regulatory authority. In this article we develop such an internal risk management approach for property-liability insurers that is based on dynamic financial analysis (DFA). The proposed concept uses a simulation technique and models the central risk factors from the investment and underwriting areas of an insurance company. On the basis of the data provided by a German insurer, the ruin probabilities under different scenarios and varying planning horizons are calculated.     

Lessons from the Financial Crisis on Risk and Capital Management: The Case of Insurance Companies

This article proposes that risk management be viewed as an integral part of the corporate value‐creation process— one in which the concept of economic capital can provide companies with the financial cushion and confidence to carry out their strategic plans. Using the case of insurance and reinsurance companies, the authors discuss three main ways that the integration of risk and capital management creates value:

• 1 strengthening solvency (by limiting the probability of financial distress);
• 2 increasing prospects for profitable growth (by preserving access to capital during post‐loss periods); and
• 3 improving transparency (by increasing the “information content” or “signaling power” of reported earnings).

Insurers can manage solvency risk by using Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) models to limit the probability of financial distress to levels consistent with the firm's specified risk tolerance. While ERM models are effective in managing “known” risks, we discuss three practices widely used in the insurance industry to manage “unknown” and “unknowable” risks using the logic of real options—slack, mutualization, and incomplete contracts. Second, risk management can create value by securing sources of capital that, like contingent capital, can be used to fund profitable growth opportunities that tend to arise in periods following large losses. Finally, the authors argue that risk management can raise the confidence of investors in their estimates of future growth by removing the “noise” in earnings that comes from bearing non‐core risks, thereby making current earnings a more reliable guide to future earnings. In support of this possibility, the authors provide evidence showing that, for a given level of reported return on equity (ROE), (re)insurers with more stable ROEs have higher price‐to‐book ratios, suggesting investors' willingness to pay a premium for the stability provided by risk management.     

The Determinants of Financial Health of Asian Insurance Companies

Previous studies of financial health of insurance companies are mainly focused on insurers operating in the United States and developed economies. This article focuses on the solvency of general (property‐liability) and life insurance companies in Asia using firm data and macro data separately. It uses different classification methods to classify the financial status of both general and life insurance companies. With the exception of Japan, failures of insurers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan are nonexistent. We find that, first, the factors that significantly affect general insurers' financial health in Asian economies are firm size, investment performance, liquidity ratio, surplus growth, combined ratio, and operating margin. Second, the factors that significantly affect life insurers' financial health are firm size, change in asset mix, investment performance, and change in product mix, but the last three factors are more applicable to Japan. Third, the financial health of insurance companies in Singapore seems to be significantly weakened by the Asian Financial Crisis. As the insurance industry in different Asian economies is at different stages of development, they require different regulatory guidelines.     

保险公司偿付能力风险信息对称性与市场供求

保险公司偿付能力充足性是保险监管的内容之一,但是这一信息却往往不被投保人所获知,造成保险供给(保险公司)和保险需求(投保人)两方信息的不对称.本文以保险公司存在偿付能力风险为基本假定,以累积性预期理论和风险调整资本收益率构建保险需求和供给模型,分析在信息对称条件下和信息不对称条件下保险需求的变化及其对保险供给和保险公司...     

Estimating the Cost of Equity for Property-Liability Insurance Companies

Due to the highly skewed and heavy‐tailed distributions associated with the insurance claims process, we evaluate the Rubinstein‐Leland (RL) model for its ability to improve the cost of equity estimates of insurance companies because of its distribution‐free feature. Our analyses show that there is as large as a 94‐basis‐point difference in the estimated cost of insurance equity between the RL model and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) for the sample of property‐liability insurers with more severe departures from normality. In addition, consistent with our hypotheses, significant differences in the market risk estimates are found for insurers with return distributions that are asymmetrically distributed, and for small insurers. Third, we find significant performance improvements from using the RL model by showing smaller values of excess return of the expected return of the portfolio to the model return for a portfolio of insurers with returns that are more skewed and for a portfolio of small insurers. Finally, our panel data analysis shows the differences in the market risk estimates are significantly influenced by firm size, degree of leverage, and degree of asymmetry. The implication is that insurers should use the RL model rather than the CAPM to estimate its cost of capital if the insurer is small (assets size is less than $2,291 million), and/or its returns are not symmetrical (the value of skewness is greater than 0.509 or less than ?0.509).     

Foreign Ownership and Non‐Life Insurer Efficiency in the Japanese Marketplace

Traditional shareholding patterns in Japan have experienced significant change beginning in the early 1990s. Since that time, foreign institutional shareholding has increased significantly largely at the expense of domestic financial institution ownership. This article examines whether these changes in ownership patterns share a relationship with insurer performance in the non‐life insurance market. Using data from 1992 to 2005, we assess performance in terms of efficiency measures using data envelopment analyses (DEA) techniques. Our results show that higher levels of domestic financial institution ownership in Japan are associated with insurer inefficiency. Relative to that relationship, the foreign ownership–insurer efficiency relationship is found to be positive. Additionally, we find that the disparity between those relationships has become more acute since 2001 when the Japanese non‐life insurance market experienced significant consolidation.     

Financial Statements Insurance

The fact that auditors are paid by the companies they audit creates an inherent conflict of interest. We analyze how the provision of financial statements insurance could eliminate this conflict of interest and properly align the incentives of auditors with those of shareholders. We first show that when the benefits to obtaining funding are sufficiently large, the existing legal and regulatory regime governing financial reporting (and auditing) results in low quality financial statements. Consequently, the financial statements of firms are misleading and firms that yield a low rate‐of‐return (low fundamental value) are over‐funded relative to firms characterized by a high rate‐of‐return (high fundamental value). We present a mechanism whereby companies would purchase financial statements insurance that provides coverage to investors against losses suffered as a result of misrepresentation in financial reports. The insurance premia that companies pay for the coverage would be publicized. The insurers appoint and pay the auditors who attest to the accuracy of the financial statements of the prospective insurance clients. For a given level of coverage firms announcing lower premia would distinguish themselves in the eyes of the investors as companies with higher quality financial statements relative to those with higher premia. Every company would be eager to pay lower premia (for a given level of coverage) resulting in a flight to high audit quality. As a result, when financial statements insurance is available and the insurer hires the auditor, capital is provided to the most efficient firms.     

Are female CEOs associated with lower insolvency risk? Evidence from the US property-casualty insurance industry

This paper investigates the relationship between female CEOs and insolvency risk of US property-casualty insurance companies. We show that female CEOs are associated with lower insurer insolvency propensity, higher z-score, and lower standard deviation of return on assets. These findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications to address potential endogeneity concerns and self-selection issues, including propensity score matching, the instrumental variable approach, and the difference-in-difference approach. Furthermore, we find that the impact of female CEOs on insurer insolvency risk is moderated by firm capitalization, the presence of female directors, and political conservatism of insurers' home states.     

Optimal Reinsurance and Investment for a Jump Diffusion Risk Process under the CEV Model

Abstract

We consider an optimal reinsurance-investment problem of an insurer whose surplus process follows a jump-diffusion model. In our model the insurer transfers part of the risk due to insurance claims via a proportional reinsurance and invests the surplus in a “simplified” financial market consisting of a risk-free asset and a risky asset. The dynamics of the risky asset are governed by a constant elasticity of variance model to incorporate conditional heteroscedasticity. The objective of the insurer is to choose an optimal reinsurance-investment strategy so as to maximize the expected exponential utility of terminal wealth. We investigate the problem using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman dynamic programming approach. Explicit forms for the optimal reinsuranceinvestment strategy and the corresponding value function are obtained. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate how the optimal investment-reinsurance policy changes when the model parameters vary.     

On the Efficiency of Bankruptcy Law: Empirical Evidence in Spain

The current economic crisis is showing one of the main problems that many companies in financial distress have to face, namely, the impact of bankruptcy law in relation to companies and firms. This paper aims to analyze the bankruptcy law ex‐ante efficiency when companies are in financial distress. To test it out, two research questions are submitted: (i) Is solvency, the criterion used in the Spanish law, the best one to assess the relative significance of the main indicators, which determine bankrupt firms? (ii) Is the Spanish bankruptcy law efficient according to solvency or are there better criteria? To answer them, a logistic regression model is conducted. The sample embraces 1,387 firms in Spain, the data being obtained from 12 Commercial Justice Courts complemented with financial information. The main conclusion is that the solvency criterion is adequate to classify bankrupt companies although currently Spanish Bankruptcy law is not as efficient as it could be. Additionally, the relevant companies' indicators, which explain the financial distress procedure, are presented. Copyright © 2013 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a stochastic environment

Consider an insurer who makes risky investments and hence faces both insurance and financial risks. The insurance business is described by a discrete-time risk model modulated by a stochastic environment that poses systemic and systematic impacts on both the insurance and financial markets. This paper endeavors to quantitatively understand the interplay of the two risks in causing ruin of the insurer. Under the bivariate regular variation framework, we obtain an asymptotic formula to describe the impacts on the insurer's solvency of the two risks and of the stochastic environment.     

Regulator's Determination of Return on Equity in the Absence of Public Firms: The Case of Automobile Insurance in Ontario

In a regulated market, such as automobile insurance (AI), regulators set the return on equity that insurers are allowed to achieve. Most insurers are engaged in a variety of insurance lines of business, and thus the full information beta methodology (FIB) is commonly employed to estimate the AI beta. The FIB uses two steps: first, the beta of each insurer is estimated, and then the beta of each line of business is estimated, as the beta of an insurer is a weighted average of the betas of the lines of business. When there are a sufficient number of public companies, company and market returns are used. Otherwise, researchers have resorted to using accounting data in the FIB. Theoretically, the two steps are not separable and the estimation should be done with one step. We introduce the one‐step methodology in our article. The one‐step and two‐step methodologies are compared empirically for the Ontario market of AI. Insurers in Ontario are predominantly private companies; thus, accounting data are used to estimate the AI beta. We show that a significant bias is introduced by the traditional, two‐step FIB methodology in estimating the betas for different lines of business, while insurers’ betas are very similar under both methods. This has a significant application to the estimation of betas of “pure players” in classic corporate finance. It implies that their betas and hence the resulting, required rates of return used in the net present value calculations should be estimated based on the one‐step method that we develop in this article.     

财务再保险与偿付能力最适边界和可解决域研究

偿付能力监管是现代保险监管方法的重要组成部分,更是衡量保险公司经营稳定与安全性的主要指标,如何改善偿付能力是保险业界必须讨论和研究的热点问题。再保险特别是财务再保险,由于其自身所具有的本质特性,将成为改善保险公司偿付能力的主要手段之一。本文基于再保险的角度去探索改善保险公司偿付能力的途径,从财务再保险的基本理论出发,介绍了财务再保险的定义、特征和分类,并结合保险公司偿付能力的有关知识分析了二者之间的关系。通过模型计算,得出了财务再保险与偿付能力最适边界和可解决域,这将极大的方便保险公司在购买财务再保险时的决策。     

Kundenbindung in der Versicherungswirtschaft — neo-institutionenökonomische Analyse und marketingpolitische Ansatzpunkte

In the 90s a shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven insurance market has taken place in Germany, and insurance companies have started to create customer loyalty by orientating their marketing policies towards the creation of and maintenance of long-term relationships. However, in the case of insurance services, uncertainty and the “information” factor play an important role. Therefore this article develops the characteristics of insurance services by using the paradigm of information economics and subsequently demonstrates the importance of trust in creating and maintaining long term insurer customer collaboration. Finally the economic implications of relational effects on customers and insurers are set forth. It can be shown that customer loyalty is mainly the result of successful management of customer relation.     

THE REVOLUTION IN CORPORATE RISK MANAGEMENT: A DECADE OF INNOVATIONS IN PROCESS AND PRODUCTS

The explosion of corporate risk management programs in the early 1990s was a hasty and ill‐conceived reaction by U.S. corporations to the great “derivatives disasters” of that period. Anxious to avoid the fate of Barings and Procter & Gamble, most top executives were more concerned about crisis management than risk management. Many companies quickly installed (often outrageously priced) value‐at‐risk (VaR) systems without paying much attention to how such systems fit their specific business requirements. Focused myopically on loss avoidance and technical risk measurement issues, the corporate risk management revolution of the '90s thus got underway in a disorganized, ad hoc fashion, producing a curious amalgam of policies and procedures with no clear link to the corporate mission of maximizing value. But as the risk management revolution unfolded over the last decade, the result has been the “convergence” of different risk management perspectives, processes, and products. The most visible sign of such convergence is a fairly recent development called “alternative risk transfer,” or ART. ART forms consist of the large and growing collection of new risk transfer and financing products now being offered by insurance and reinsurance companies. As just one example, a new class of security known as “contingent capital” gives a company the option over a specified period—say, the next five years—to issue new equity or debt at a pre‐negotiated price. And to hold down their cost, such “pre‐loss” financing options are typically designed to be “triggered” only when the firm is most likely to need an infusion of new capital to avoid underinvestment or financial distress. But underlying—and to a large extent driving—this convergence of insurance and capital markets is a more fundamental kind of convergence: the integration of risk management with corporate financing decisions. As first corporate finance theorists and now practitioners have come to realize, decisions about a company's optimal capital structure and the design of its securities cannot be made without first taking account of the firm's risks and its opportunities for managing them. Indeed, this article argues that a comprehensive, value‐maximizing approach to corporate finance must begin with a risk management strategy that incorporates the full range of available risk management products, including the new risk finance products as well as established risk transfer instruments like interest rate and currency derivatives. The challenge confronting today's CFO is to maximize firm value by choosing the mixture of securities and risk management products and solutions that gives the company access to capital at the lowest possible cost.     

Building a Bridge between Marketing and Finance

Corporate finance executives are often frustrated by spending proposals from their marketing colleagues but cannot seem to be able to quantify the putative benefits. Similarly, the marketing staff is frustrated by the finance team's inability to convert soft marketing metrics, such as “awareness” and “customer satisfaction” into financial forecasts. The challenge is that neither marketers nor finance executives have been able to articulate a single analytical framework which both explains how and why brands come to flourish or flounder and how brand growth contributes to the business's short and long term bottom line. Lacking an effective way to do this now, most managers default to using the hard data they do have, namely how marketing investment is likely to impact sales this quarter and next. This reinforces the widespread focus on quarterly EPS and reduces the perceived value of the marketing department to their ability to hit three month sales targets. This degraded view of marketing's contribution and the inability to link “soft” marketing metrics to longer term financial returns impedes building long‐term brand value. This article focuses on how advances in behavioral science and financial analytics offer an effective way to bridge this gap between marketing and finance. Building that bridge requires better measures of brand health and financial performance to allocate capital and marketing resources. Undoubtedly, brand building is both an art and a science. But, the finance people can develop an evidence‐based framework explaining how some of the “softer” investments such as brand building, contribute to the value of the firm.     

Potential “Savings” of Medicare: The Analysis of Medicare Advantage and Accountable Care Organizations

Medicare faces significant financial challenges because of rising health care costs. In response, Medicare reform efforts have been testing various payment and service delivery models, including accountable care organizations (ACOs), aiming to reduce expenditures while preserving or enhancing the coordination of quality care. The idea behind ACOs is to form an organizational network to coordinate all care for Medicare beneficiaries and in so doing, at least theoretically, improve quality of care and hopefully reduce medical costs. The purpose of this research is to apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess the potential savings of Medicare obtainable through optimally efficient implementation of ACOs and Medicare Advantage plans. DEA comparisons across plans achieve this purpose by identifying which Medicare plans operate relatively more efficiently and which are inefficient, and additionally, for inefficient plans, the DEA analysis generates target levels of “inputs” and “outputs” required to bring the plan into efficient operation. Knowing sources of inefficiency can also provide insights into Medicare reform, such as Medicare privatization and innovation models. Our results show that Medicare Advantage plans are more efficient in reducing health expenditures but incur higher administrative costs. Health expenditure savings can also be achievable by promoting government-sponsored managed Medicare such as ACOs. Finally, compared to the profit efficiency of Medicaid managed care plans, Medicare Advantage should have the potential for more Medicare market penetration from the supply (insurer) side.     

Pricing and Capital Allocation for Multiline Insurance Firms

We study multiline insurance companies with limited liability. Insurance premiums are determined by no‐arbitrage principles. The results are developed under the realistic assumption that the losses created by insurer default are allocated among policyholders following an ex post, pro rata, sharing rule. In general, the ratio of default costs to expected claims, and thus the ratio of premiums to expected claims, vary across insurance lines. Moreover, capital and related costs are allocated across lines in proportion to each line's share of a digital default option on the insurer. Our results expand and generalize those derived elsewhere in the literature.