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Different insurance activities exhibit different levels of persistence of shocks and volatility. For example, life insurance is typically more persistent but less volatile than non-life insurance. We examine how diversification among life, non-life insurance, and active reinsurance business affects an insurer's contribution and exposure to the risk of other companies. Our model shows that a counterparty's credit risk exposure to an insurance group substantially depends on the relative proportion of the insurance group's life and non-life business. The empirical analysis confirms this finding with respect to several measures for spillover risk. The optimal proportion of life business that minimizes spillover risk decreases with leverage of the insurance group, and increases with active reinsurance business.
Telemonitoring devices can be used to screen consumers' characteristics and mitigate information asymmetries that lead to adverse selection in insurance markets. However, some consumers value their privacy and dislike sharing private information with insurers. In the second-best efficient Wilson-Miyazaki-Spence framework, we allow for consumers to reveal their risk type for an individual subjective cost and show analytically how this affects insurance market equilibria as well as utilitarian social welfare. Our analysis shows that the choice of information disclosure with respect to revelation of their risk type can substitute deductibles for consumers whose transparency aversion is sufficiently low. This can lead to a Pareto improvement of social welfare and a Pareto efficient market allocation. However, if all consumers are offered cross-subsidizing contracts, the introduction of a transparency contract decreases or even eliminates cross-subsidies. Given the prior existence of a WMS equilibrium, utility is shifted from individuals who do not reveal their private information to those who choose to reveal. Our analysis provides a theoretical foundation for the discussion on consumer protection in the context of digitalization. It shows that new technologies bring new ways to challenge crosssubsidization in insurance markets and stresses the negative externalities that digitalization has on consumers who are not willing to take part in this development.
This paper investigates the effects of a rise in interest rate and lapse risk of endowment life insurance policies on the liquidity and solvency of life insurers. We model the book and market value balance sheet of an average German life insurer, subject to both GAAP and Solvency II regulation, featuring an existing back book of policies and an existing asset allocation calibrated by historical data. The balance sheet is then projected forward under stochastic financial markets. Lapse rates are modeled stochastically and depend on the granted guaranteed rate of return and prevailing level of interest rates. Our results suggest that in the case of a sharp increase in interest rates, policyholders sharply increase lapses and the solvency position of the insurer deteriorates in the short-run. This result is particularly driven by the interaction between a reduction in the market value of assets, large guarantees for existing policies, and a very slow adjustment of asset returns to interest rates. A sharp or gradual rise in interest rates is associated with substantial and persistent liquidity needs, that are particularly driven by lapse rates.
Under Solvency II, corporate governance requirements are a complementary, but nonetheless essential, element to build a sound regulatory framework for insurance undertakings, also to address risks not specifically mitigated by the sole solvency capital requirements. After recalling the provisions of the Second Pillar concerning the system of governance, the paper highlights the emerging regulatory trends in the corporate governance of insurance firms. Among others things, it signals the exceptional extension of the duties and responsibilities assigned to the board of directors, far beyond the traditional role of both monitoring the chief executive officer, and assessing the overall direction and strategy of the business. However, a better risk governance is not necessarily built on narrow rule-based approaches to corporate governance.
A tontine provides a mortality driven, age-increasing payout structure through the pooling of mortality. Because a tontine does not entail any guarantees, the payout structure of a tontine is determined by the pooling of individual characteristics of tontinists. Therefore, the surrender decision of single tontinists directly affects the remaining members' payouts. Nevertheless, the opportunity to surrender is crucial to the success of a tontine from a regulatory as well as a policyholder perspective. Therefore, this paper derives the fair surrender value of a tontine, first on the basis of expected values, and then incorporates the increasing payout volatility to determine an equitable surrender value. Results show that the surrender decision requires a discount on the fair surrender value as security for the remaining members. The discount intensifies in decreasing tontine size and increasing risk aversion. However, tontinists are less willing to surrender for decreasing tontine size and increasing risk aversion, creating a natural protection against tontine runs stemming from short-term liquidity shocks. Furthermore we argue that a surrender decision based on private information requires a discount on the fair surrender value as well.
Under Solvency II, corporate governance requirements are a complementary, but nonetheless essential, element to build a sound regulatory framework for insurance undertakings, also to address risks not specifically mitigated by the sole solvency capital requirements. After recalling the provisions of the second pillar concerning the system of governance, the paper is devoted to highlight the emerging regulatory trends in the corporate governance of insurance firms. Among others, it signals the exceptional extension of the duties and responsibilities assigned to the Board of directors, far beyond the traditional role of both monitoring the chief executive officer, and assessing the overall direction and strategy of the business. However, a better risk governance is not necessarily built on narrow rule-based approaches to corporate governance.
We study the impact of estimation errors of firms on social welfare. For this purpose, we present a model of the insurance market in which insurers face parameter uncertainty about expected loss sizes. As consumers react to under- and overestimation by increasing and decreasing demand, respectively, insurers require a safety loading for parameter uncertainty. If the safety loading is too small, less risk averse consumers benefit from less informed insurers by speculating on them underestimating expected losses. Otherwise, social welfare increases with insurers’ information. We empirically estimate safety loadings in the US property and casualty insurance market, and show that these are likely to be sufficiently large for consumers to benefit from more informed insurers.
We explore space improvements in LRP, a polymorphically typed call-by-need functional core language. A relaxed space measure is chosen for the maximal size usage during an evaluation. It Abstracts from the details of the implementation via abstract machines, but it takes garbage collection into account and thus can be seen as a realistic approximation of space usage. The results are: a context lemma for space improving translations and for space equivalences; all but one reduction rule of the calculus are shown to be space improvements, and the exceptional one, the copy-rule, is shown to increase space only moderately.
Several further program transformations are shown to be space improvements or space equivalences, in particular the translation into machine expressions is a space equivalence. These results are a step Forward in making predictions about the change in runtime space behavior of optimizing transformations in callbyneed functional languages.
Helmut Siekmann erläutert in seinem Beitrag die Einstandspflicht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für die Deutsche Bundesbank und die Europäische Zentralbank. Dabei kommt er zu dem Schluss, dass weder eine „Haftung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für Verluste der EZB noch eine Verpflichtung zur Auffüllung von aufgezehrtem Eigenkapital“ besteht.
Dieser Beitrag ist zuerst erschienen in: Festschrift für Theodor Baums zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, S. 1145-1179, Helmut Siekmann, Andreas Cahn, Tim Florstedt, Katja Langenbucher, Julia Redenius-Hövermann, Tobias Tröger, Ulrich Segna, Hrsg., Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck 2017
Financial market interactions can lead to large and persistent booms and recessions. Instability is an inherent threat to economies with speculative financial markets. A central bank’s interest rate setting can amplify the expectation feedback in the financial market and this can lead to unstable dynamics and excess volatility. The paper suggests that policy institutions may be well-advised to handle tools like asset price targeting with care since such instruments might add a structural link between asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates. Neither stock prices nor indices are a good indicator to base decisions on.
The level of capital tax gains has high explanatory power regarding the question of what drives economic inequality. On this basis, the authors develop a simple, yet micro-founded portfolio selection model to explain the dynamics of wealth inequality given empirical tax series in the US. The results emphasize that the level and the transition of speed of wealth inequality depend crucially on the degree of capital taxation. The projections predict that – continuing on the present path of capital taxation in the US – the gap between rich and poor is expected to shrink whereas “massive” tax cuts will further increase the degree of wealth concentration.
I analyze the real effects of the quality of the judicial enforcement by showing that an increase in the average duration of civil proceedings reduces firms' employment. I exploit a reorganization of court districts in Italy as an exogenous shock to court productivity and, using an instrumental variable approach, estimate an elasticity of employment to average trial length between -0.24 and -0.29. These results are very different from OLS estimates which do not control for endogeneity, and suggest that stronger law enforcement eases financing constraints. The effects are more pronounced in highly levered and more financially dependent firms, and appear to affect mainly firms in less financially developed areas. Revenues respond more slowly than employment to the reform, and wages fall as the judiciary improves. There is no evidence of effects on capital structure and profitability. These results offer a more complete picture of the interplay between legal institutions and real economic outcomes.
This paper aims to analyze the effects of financial constraints and the financial crisis on the financing and investment policies of newly founded firms. Thereby, the analysis adds important new insights on a crucial segment of the economy. We make use of a large and comprehensive data set of French firms founded in the years 2004-2006, i.e. well before the financial crisis. Our panel data analysis shows that the global financial crisis imposed a shock (mostly demand-driven) on the financing as well as on the investments of these firms. Moreover, we find that financially constrained firms use less external debt financing and invest smaller amounts. They also rely on less trade credit. With regard to bank financing, newly founded firms which are more financially constrained accumulate less bank debt and repay initial bank debt slower than their non-financially constraint counterparts. Finally, we find that financially constrained firms are affected to a smaller degree by the financial crisis than their less financially constrained counterparts.
We propose a model for measuring the runtime of concurrent programs by the minimal number of evaluation steps. The focus of this paper are improvements, which are program transformations that improve this number in every context, where we distinguish between sequential and parallel improvements, for one or more processors, respectively. We apply the methods to CHF, a model of Concurrent Haskell extended by futures. The language CHF is a typed higher-order functional language with concurrent threads, monadic IO and MVars as synchronizing variables. We show that all deterministic reduction rules and 15 further program transformations are sequential and parallel improvements. We also show that introduction of deterministic parallelism is a parallel improvement, and its inverse a sequential improvement, provided it is applicable. This is a step towards more automated precomputation of concurrent programs during compile time, which is also formally proven to be correctly optimizing.
Die Bedeutung der AKM-Entscheidung des EuGH für das Recht der Kabelweitersendung in Deutschland
(2017)
Der Beitrag erörtert die Auswirkungen der »AKM/Zürs.net«-Entscheidung des EuGH für die Praxis der Kabelweitersendung in Deutschland. Aus dem Urteil folgt, dass die integrale Kabelweitersendung der öffentlich-rechtlichen und privaten deutschen Fernsehsender im Inland kein neues Publikum erreicht und daher nicht gesondert erlaubnispflichtig ist. Bei ausländischen Sendern kommt es auf die Umstände des Einzelfalls an.
The publication of the Liikanen Group's final report in October 2012 was surrounded by high expectations regarding the implementation of the reform plans through the proposed measures that reacted to the financial and sovereign debt crises. The recommendations mainly focused on introducing a mild version of banking separation and the creation of the preconditions for bail-in measures. In this article, we present an overview of the regulatory reforms, to which the financial sector has been subject over the past years in accordance with the concepts laid out in the Liikanen Report. It becomes clear from our assessment that more specific steps have yet to be taken before the agenda is accomplished. In particular, bail-in rules must be implemented more consistently. Beyond the question of the required minimum, the authors develop the notion of a maximum amount of liabilities subject to bail-in. The combination of both components leads to a three-layer structure of bank capital: a bail-in tranche, a deposit-insured bailout tranche, and an intermediate run-endangered mezzanine tranche. The size and treatment of the latter must be put to a political debate that weighs the costs and benefits of a further increase in financial stability beyond that achieved through loss-bearing of the bail-in tranche.
New provisioning rules introduced by IFRS 9 are expected to reduce the procyclicality of provisioning. Heterogeneity among banks in the procyclicality of provisioning may not only reflect the formal accounting rules, but also variation in discretionary provisioning policies. This paper presents empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of provisioning procyclicality among significant banks that are directly supervised by the ECB. In particular, this paper finds that provisioning is relatively procyclical at banks that have i) high loans-to-assets ratios, ii) high shares of non-interest income in total operating income, iii) low capitalization rates, and iv) low total assets. Supervisory guidance provided to banks on how to implement IFRS 9 has mostly been of a qualitative nature, and may prove inadequate to prevent an undesirably wide future variation in provisioning among EU banks.
This paper was provided at the request of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament and commissioned and drafted under the responsibility of the Economic Governance Support Unit (EGOV) of the European Parliament. It was originally published on the European Parliament’s webpage.
Seit 2006 haben die Bundesländer das Recht, den Steuersatz der Grunderwerbsteuer selbst zu bestimmen. Von diesem Recht wurde in den meisten Bundesländern – mit Ausnahme von Bayern und Sachsen – ausgiebig Gebrauch gemacht. Mit dieser Entwicklung sind verschiedene negative Begleiterscheinungen der Steuer weiter in den Vordergrund gerückt. Ausweichreaktionen und Preiseffekte auf dem Immobilienmarkt führten dazu, dass aus jedem Prozent, um das der Steuersatz erhöht wurde, schätzungsweise nur rund 0,6 Prozent zusätzliche Steuereinahmen resultierten, während ohne Ausweichreaktionen und Preiseffekte eine Einnahmenerhöhung um ein Prozent zu erwarten gewesen wäre. Hinter diesem unterproportionalen Aufkommenseffekt sind verschiedene Mechanismen zu vermuten, wie etwa die Umgehung durch den Kauf des Grundvermögens als Teil einer Kapitalgesellschaft.
In Anbetracht der gestiegenen Steuersätze wurde im letzten Bundestagswahlkampf aus CDU sowie FDP der Ruf laut nach einem Freibetrag für Immobilienkäufer, die erworbenes Wohneigentum selbst nutzen möchten. Die Kinderzahl soll den Freibetrag je nach Vorschlag erhöhen.
Der Beitrag diskutiert kritisch die Forderung nach einer Familienkomponente der Grunderwerbssteuer und zeigt darüber hinaus mögliche Alternativen zur Einschränkung der Steuergestaltungen durch Share Deals auf.
Coming (great) events cast their (long) shadow before. As the financial crisis gave birth to the creation of the European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS), the imminent Brexit now serves as an impulse to rather extensively reorganize it. Pursuant to the preferences of the Commission—as revealed in its draft for a regulation amending the regulations founding the European Supervisory Authorities (ESA)—the supervision (and regulation) of the financial sectors should be further centralized and integrated and additional powers should be given to the ESAs. To a large degree these alterations are intended to adjust the competences of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to better meet its new objectives under the Capital Markets Union (“CMU”). In view that an equivalent to the CMU or the Banking Union—in the sense of a European Insurance Union—is not yet on the horizon for the insurance sector (or the occupational pensions sector), one could prima vista take the view that insurance supervision and regulation is once again taken captive by the necessity of regulatory reforms stemming from other financial sectors. However, even if that is partially the case, the outcome of the intended reforms might still be advantageous for the insurance sector and an important step in the right direction. Therefore, it needs to be intensively discussed.
At this stage, some of the most prominent envisioned changes to the structure, tasks and powers of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and their necessity, usefulness or counter-productivity still have to be examined.