Strategisches Asset-Liability Management in der Versicherungswirtschaft — Ein Ansatz zur integrierten Bilanzstrukturoptimierung

Asset-Liability Management has gained increased significance within the German insurance industry. This was mainly driven by recent capital market developments. In fact, insurers have encountered challenges to earn given interest guarantees. Regulatory changes also require more sophisticated ALM-tools. Solvency II will change the underlying paradigm and shift balance sheets perception towards a market value oriented view. Especially liabilities will have to be accounted for using the fair value approach. Most ALM-tools appear to be unable to cope with these demands. To improve this current practice, in this paper a Markowitz-approach is employed in order to generate an integrated method for the optimization of assets and liabilities in the life insurance industry. This technique aims to link new regulatory requirements to the latest capital market theory and therefore delivers a procedure for an integrated asset allocation policy in the insurance industry.     

Asymptotics for Autocovariances and Integrated Periodograms for Linear Processes Observed at Lower Frequencies

One of the most frequently used class of processes in time series analysis is the one of linear processes. For many statistical quantities, among them sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations, central limit theorems are available in the literature. We investigate classical linear processes under a nonstandard observation pattern; namely, we assume that we are only able to observe the linear process at a lower frequency. It is shown that such observation pattern destroys the linear structure of the observations and leads to substantially different asymptotic results for standard statistical quantities. Central limit theorems are given for sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations as well as more general integrated periodograms and ratio statistics. Moreover, for specific autoregressive processes, the possibilities to estimate the parameters of the underlying autoregression from lower frequency observations are addressed. Finally, we suggest for autoregressions of order 2 a valid bootstrap procedure. A small simulation study demonstrates the performance of the bootstrap proposal for finite sample size.     

How Does the Minimum Wage Affect Firm Investments in Fixed and Human Capital? Evidence from China

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of Chinese minimum wage regulations on the firm decision to invest in physical and human capital. We exploit the geographical and inter‐temporal variations of county‐level minimum wages in a panel data set of all state‐owned and all above‐scale non‐state‐owned Chinese firms covering the introduction of the new Chinese minimum wage regulations in 2004. In our basic regressions including all Chinese firms, we find significant negative effects of the minimum wage on human capital investment rates and no overall effects on fixed capital investment rates. When grouping firms by their ownership structure, we find that these results hold for most firms. Foreign‐owned firms are an exception to some extent, because the likelihood that they invest in human capital has not decreased in response to the policy.     

Financial amplification of foreign exchange risk premia

Theories of financial frictions in international capital markets suggest that financial intermediaries' balance sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We present empirical evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals, and a component associated with financial intermediary balance sheets. Relative to the benchmark model with only macroeconomic state variables, balance sheets amplify the U.S. dollar risk premium. We discuss applications to financial stability monitoring.