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This article presents an overview of the contemporary German insurance market, its structure, players, and development trends. First, brief information about the history of the insurance industry in Germany is provided. Second, the contemporary market is analyzed in terms of its legal and economic structure, with statistics on the number of companies, insurance density and penetration, the role of insurers in the capital markets, premiums split, and main market players and their market shares. Furthermore, the three biggest insurance lines—life, health, and property and casualty—are considered in more detail, such as product range, country specifics, and insurance and investment results. A section on regulation outlines its implementation in the insurance sector, offering information on the underlying legislative basis, supervisory body, technical procedures, expected developments, and sources of more detailed information.
Electric charge correlations were studied for p+p, C+C, Si+Si, and centrality selected Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt[sNN]=17.2 GeV with the NA49 large acceptance detector at the CERN SPS. In particular, long-range pseudorapidity correlations of oppositely charged particles were measured using the balance function method. The width of the balance function decreases with increasing system size and centrality of the reactions. This decrease could be related to an increasing delay of hadronization in central Pb+Pb collisions.
Dt. Fassung: Der Umgang mit Rechtsparadoxien: Derrida, Luhmann, Wiethölter. In: Christian Joerges und Gunther Teubner (Hg.) Rechtsverfassungsrecht: Recht-Fertigungen zwischen Sozialtheorie und Privatrechtsdogmatik. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2003, 249-272.
This paper starts out by pointing out the challenges and weaknesses which the German banking systems faces according to the prevailing views among national and international observers. These challenges include a generalproblem of profitability and, possibly as its main reason, the strong role of public banks. These concerns raise the questions whether the facts support this assessment of a general profitability problem and whether there are reasons to expect a fundamental or structural transformation of the German banking system. The paper contains four sections. The first one presents the evidence concerning the profitability problem in a comparative, international perspective. The second section presents information about the so-called three-pillar system of German banking. What might be surprising in this context is that the group of pub lic banks is not only the largest segment of the German banking system, but that the primary savings banks also are its financially most successful part. The German banking system is highly fragmented. This fact suggests to discuss past, present and possible future consolidations in the banking system in the third section. The authors provide evidence to the effect that within- group consolidation has been going on at a rapid pace in the public and the cooperative banking groups in recent years and that this development has not yet come to an end, while within-group consolidation among the large private banks, consolidation across group boundaries at a national level and cross-border or international consolidation has so far only happened at a limited scale, and do not appear to gain momentum in the near future. In the last section, the authors develop their explanation for the fact that large-scale and cross border consolidation has so far not materialized to any great extent. Drawing on the concept of complementarity, they argue that it would be difficult to expect these kinds of mergers and acquisitions happening within a financial system which is itself surprisingly stable, or, as one cal also call it, resistant to change.
Asset-backed securitization (ABS) has become a viable and increasingly attractive risk management and refinancing method either as a standalone form of structured finance or as securitized debt in Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). However, the absence of industry standardization has prevented rising investment demand from translating into market liquidity comparable to traditional fixed income instruments, in all but a few selected market segments. Particularly low financial transparency and complex security designs inhibits profound analysis of secondary market pricing and how it relates to established forms of external finance. This paper represents the first attempt to measure the intertemporal, bivariate causal relationship between matched price series of equity and ABS issued by the same entity. In a two-dimensional linear system of simultaneous equations we investigate the short-term dynamics and long-term consistency of daily secondary market data from the U.K. Sterling ABS/MBS market and exchange traded shares between 1998 and 2004 with and without the presence of cointegration. Our causality framework delivers compelling empirical support for a strong co-movement between matched price series of ABS-equity pairs, where ABS markets seem to contribute more to price discovery over the long run. Controlling for cointegration, risk-free interest and average market risk of corporate debt hardly alters our results. However, once we qualify the magnitude and direction of price discovery on various security characteristics, such as the ABS asset class, we find that ABS-equity pairs with large-scale CMBS/RMBS and credit card/student loan ABS reveal stronger lead-lag relationships and joint price dynamics than whole business ABS. JEL Classifications: G10, G12, G24
Although the commoditisation of illiquid asset exposures through securitisation facilitates the disciplining effect of capital markets on the risk management, private information about securitised debt as well as complex transaction structures could possibly impair the fair market valuation. In a simple issue design model without intermediaries we maximise issuer proceeds over a positive measure of issue quality, where a direct revelation mechanism (DRM) by profitable informed investors engages endogenous price discovery through auction-style allocation preference as a continuous function of perceived issue quality. We derive an optimal allocation schedule for maximum issuer payoffs under different pricing regimes if asymmetric information requires underpricing. In particular, we study how the incidence of uninformed investors at varying levels of valuation uncertainty and their function of clearing the market effects profitable informed investment. We find that the issuer optimises own payoffs at each valuation irrespective of the applicable pricing mechanism by awarding informed investors the lowest possible allocation (and attendant underpricing) that still guarantees profitable informed investment. Under uniform pricing the composition of the investor pool ensures that informed investors appropriate higher profit than uninformed types. Any reservation utility by issuers lowers the probability of information disclosure by informed investors and the scope of issuers to curtail profitable informed investment. JEL Classifications: D82, G12, G14, G23
Asset securitisation as a risk management and funding tool : what does it hold in store for SMES?
(2005)
The following chapter critically surveys the attendant benefits and drawbacks of asset securitisation on both financial institutions and firms. It also elicits salient lessons to be learned about the securitisation of SME-related obligations from a cursory review of SME securitisation in Germany as a foray of asset securitisation in a bank-centred financial system paired with a strong presence of SMEs in industrial production. JEL Classification: D81, G15, M20
As a sign of ambivalence in the regulatory definition of capital adequacy for credit risk and the quest for more efficient refinancing sources collateral loan obligations (CLOs) have become a prominent securitisation mechanism. This paper presents a loss-based asset pricing model for the valuation of constituent tranches within a CLO-style security design. The model specifically examines how tranche subordination translates securitised credit risk into investment risk of issued tranches as beneficial interests on a designated loan pool typically underlying a CLO transaction. We obtain a tranchespecific term structure from an intensity-based simulation of defaults under both robust statistical analysis and extreme value theory (EVT). Loss sharing between issuers and investors according to a simplified subordination mechanism allows issuers to decompose securitised credit risk exposures into a collection of default sensitive debt securities with divergent risk profiles and expected investor returns. Our estimation results suggest a dichotomous effect of loss cascading, with the default term structure of the most junior tranche of CLO transactions (“first loss position”) being distinctly different from that of the remaining, more senior “investor tranches”. The first loss position carries large expected loss (with high investor return) and low leverage, whereas all other tranches mainly suffer from loss volatility (unexpected loss). These findings might explain why issuers retain the most junior tranche as credit enhancement to attenuate asymmetric information between issuers and investors. At the same time, the issuer discretion in the configuration of loss subordination within particular security design might give rise to implicit investment risk in senior tranches in the event of systemic shocks. JEL Classifications: C15, C22, D82, F34, G13, G18, G20
System-size dependence of strangeness production in nucleus-nucleus collisions at √sNN = 17.3 GeV
(2005)
Emission of pi, K, phi and Lambda was measured in near-central C+C and Si+Si collisions at 158 AGeV beam energy. Together with earlier data for p+p, S+S and Pb+Pb, the system-size dependence of relative strangeness production in nucleus-nucleus collisions is obtained. Its fast rise and the saturation observed at about 60 participating nucleons can be understood as onset of the formation of coherent partonic subsystems of increasing size. PACS numbers: 25.75.-q
Results are presented on Omega production in central Pb+Pb collisions at 40 and 158 AGeV beam energy. Given are transverse-mass spectra, rapidity distributions, and total yields for the sum Omega+Antiomega at 40 AGeV and for Omega and Antiomega separately at 158 AGeV. The yields are strongly under-predicted by the string-hadronic UrQMD model and are in better agreement with predictions from a hadron gas models. PACS numbers: 25.75.Dw