IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/srk/srkops/202322.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Insurers’ investment behaviour and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

Author

Listed:
  • Fay, Constanze
  • Ghiselli, Angelica

Abstract

This research explores two aspects of European insurers’ investment behaviour related to crises. While they are often considered as financial market stabilisers and long-term investors, there is currently a lack of knowledge about insurers’ investment behaviour in crises under the regulatory Solvency II regime implemented in 2016. With assets of nearly €9 trillion and bond holdings of more than €3 trillion in Q2 2022, European insurers are important financial intermediaries and finance European economies. With an empirical study, we investigate their reaction to the asset price shock at the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the first quarter of 2020 and explore cyclical investment behaviour by replicating Timmer’s (2018) study with fixed effects panel regressions. We use a large cross-country dataset, with the novelty of exploiting cross-country heterogeneity for European countries with 458,758 security-level observations from 2017 to 2022. Overall, our findings are very relevant from a policy perspective as they suggest active and heterogeneous cyclical investment behaviour in the European insurance market with differences across issuer and holder countries of domicile. JEL Classification: G01, G11, G15, G22, G28

Suggested Citation

  • Fay, Constanze & Ghiselli, Angelica, 2023. "Insurers’ investment behaviour and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic," ESRB Occasional Paper Series 22, European Systemic Risk Board.
    • Handle: RePEc:srk:srkops:202322
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.esrb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/occasional/esrb.op22~4f76715480.en.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timmer, Yannick, 2018. "Cyclical investment behavior across financial institutions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(2), pages 268-286.
    2. Kubitza, Christian, 2021. "Investor-driven corporate finance: Evidence from insurance markets," ICIR Working Paper Series 43/21, Goethe University Frankfurt, International Center for Insurance Regulation (ICIR).
    3. Kraus, Alan & Litzenberger, Robert H, 1976. "Skewness Preference and the Valuation of Risk Assets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 31(4), pages 1085-1100, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kaufmann, Christoph & Leyva, Jaime & Storz, Manuela, 2024. "Insurance corporations’ balance sheets, financial stability and monetary policy," Working Paper Series 2892, European Central Bank.
    2. Kubitza, Christian & Grochola, Nicolaus & Gründl, Helmut, 2021. "Life insurance convexity," ICIR Working Paper Series 42/21, Goethe University Frankfurt, International Center for Insurance Regulation (ICIR).
    3. Benjamin Knox & Jakob Ahm Sørensen, 2024. "Insurers’ Investments and Insurance Prices," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2024-058, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Shi, Yun & Cui, Xiangyu & Zhou, Xunyu, 2020. "Beta and Coskewness Pricing: Perspective from Probability Weighting," SocArXiv 5rqhv, Center for Open Science.
    5. Bubeck, Johannes & Maddaloni, Angela & Peydró, José-Luis, 2020. "Negative Monetary Policy Rates and Systemic Banks' Risk‐Taking: Evidence from the Euro Area Securities Register," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 52(S1), pages 197-231.
    6. Charlie Cai & Robert Faff & David Hillier & Michael McKenzie, 2006. "Modelling return and conditional volatility exposures in global stock markets," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 27(2), pages 125-142, September.
    7. Christoph Kaufmann, 2023. "Investment Funds, Monetary Policy, and the Global Financial Cycle," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 21(2), pages 593-636.
    8. Egozcue, Martín & García, Luis Fuentes & Wong, Wing-Keung & Zitikis, Ricardas, 2011. "Do investors like to diversify? A study of Markowitz preferences," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 215(1), pages 188-193, November.
    9. Robert F. Whitelaw, 1997. "Time-Varying Sharpe Ratios and Market Timing," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires 98-074, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    10. Luca Riccetti, 2013. "A copula–GARCH model for macro asset allocation of a portfolio with commodities," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 1315-1336, June.
    11. John D. Burger & Francis E. Warnock, 2007. "Foreign participation in local currency bond markets," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 16(3), pages 291-304.
    12. Kim, Hohyun & Kim, Kyoung Tae & Hanna, Sherman D., 2022. "The Effect of Investment Literacy on the Likelihood of Retail Investor Margin Trading and Having a Margin Call," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 45(C).
    13. David Backus & Mikhail Chernov & Ian Martin, 2011. "Disasters Implied by Equity Index Options," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(6), pages 1969-2012, December.
    14. Carvalho, Daniel, 2020. "Leverage and valuation effects: How global liquidity shapes sectoral balance sheets," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    15. Lin, Chaonan & Chen, Hong-Yi & Ko, Kuan-Cheng & Yang, Nien-Tzu, 2021. "Time-dependent lottery preference and the cross-section of stock returns," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 272-294.
    16. Chang, Bo Young & Christoffersen, Peter & Jacobs, Kris, 2013. "Market skewness risk and the cross section of stock returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(1), pages 46-68.
    17. Francis, Bill B. & Mougoué, Mbodja & Panchenko, Valentyn, 2010. "Is there a symmetric nonlinear causal relationship between large and small firms?," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 23-38, January.
    18. M. Glawischnig & I. Seidl, 2013. "Portfolio optimization with serially correlated, skewed and fat tailed index returns," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 21(1), pages 153-176, January.
    19. Massimiliano Barbi & Silvia Romagnoli, 2016. "Optimal hedge ratio under a subjective re-weighting of the original measure," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(14), pages 1271-1280, March.
    20. Stefanescu, Razvan & Dumitriu, Ramona, 2015. "Conţinutul analizei seriilor de timp financiare [The Essentials of the Analysis of Financial Time Series]," MPRA Paper 67175, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cyclicality; Debt Capital Flows; Financial Stability; Insurance companies; Pandemic; Portfolio Allocation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:srk:srkops:202322. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Official Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esrbede.html .

    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.