IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/anr/refeco/v8y2016p155-174.html

The Life Insurance Industry and Systemic Risk: A Bond Market Perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Anna Paulson

    (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60604)

  • Richard Rosen

    (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60604)

Abstract

The 2008 financial crisis brought a focus on the potential for a large insurance firm to contribute to systemic risk. Among the concerns raised was that a negative shock to insurers could lead to a fire sale of corporate bonds, a market where insurers are among the largest participants. This manuscript discusses the existing evidence on life insurance firms and systemic risk, with a focus on the investment-grade corporate bond market. We provide some tentative evidence that life insurers tend to absorb liquidity risk by purchasing bonds when the bonds are less liquid than average. However, we do not find evidence that insurers increased bond purchases specifically during the financial crisis, leaving open the question of whether insurers would play a stabilizing role in a future crisis.

Suggested Citation

  • Anna Paulson & Richard Rosen, 2016. "The Life Insurance Industry and Systemic Risk: A Bond Market Perspective," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 8(1), pages 155-174, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:8:y:2016:p:155-174
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-financial-121415-032840
    Download Restriction: Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chia‐Chun Chiang & Greg Niehaus, 2020. "Correlated Trading by Life Insurers and Its Impact on Bond Prices," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 87(3), pages 597-625, September.
    2. Dario Focarelli, 2017. "Why Insurance Regulation is Crucial for Long-term Investment and Economic Growth," LEAP Working Papers 2017/1, Luiss Institute for European Analysis and Policy.
    3. Giovanni Bonaccolto & Nicola Borri & Andrea Consiglio & Giorgio Di Giorgio, 2025. "Systemic Risk in the European Insurance Sector," Papers 2505.02635, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:8:y:2016:p:155-174. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: http://www.annualreviews.org (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.annualreviews.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.