The Geneva papers on risk and insurance. Issues and practice最新文献

The recent COVID-19 outbreak and significant increase in resulting global uncertainty poses many challenges to financial sectors. Many regulators took measures to safeguard the resilience of financial institutions by requesting postponements of dividend distributions until uncertainties about further development diminished. Specifically, on 2 April 2020, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority issued a statement requesting that re/insurers suspend all discretionary dividend distributions and share buybacks aimed at remunerating shareholders. Although the goal was to strengthen the overall financial stability of the sector, it may have negatively influenced insurers' equity prices in the short term. Hence, this paper empirically investigates this potential effect using an event study methodology. Although negative drops were observed in some cases, the obtained empirical results suggest that they were not statistically significant for the European insurers' equity market when considering the event windows covering several days after the statement was published.

We empirically examine the effect of local religious beliefs on the risk-taking behaviour of U.S. life insurers headquartered in that region. We distinguish between insurers that predominantly write annuities and insurers that predominantly write life insurance policies; the annuity business is relatively riskier than writing life insurance. Insurers headquartered in high-Catholic or low-Protestant areas are more likely to be annuity writers. Annuity writers located in high-Catholic or low-Protestant areas invest more in risky assets and exhibit higher investment return volatilities, as well as a higher volatility of their return on assets. Overall, our results suggest that local culture has significant influences on life insurers' behaviour.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41288-021-00211-z.

The insurance industry is innovating. Business models, services and processes are rapidly evolving, largely backed by technological developments. The particular historical context of COVID-19 provides a suitable case to understand the relevance of exploiting technology to react quickly to traditional and emerging risks. Focusing on the initiatives put in place by the most influential insurance companies at the global level, we have framed the innovation mechanisms in the industry, highlighting four rationales underpinning these initiatives (Adaption, Expansion, Reaction and Aggression), which differ according to the relevance of the technology in use and innovation to the portfolio of risks covered. Overall, it emerges that insurance companies have the room and capability to innovate, in many cases using technological applications to cover new and existing risks. While the initiatives studied concern the entire value chain, basic primary activities, such as product development, sales and claims management, show that innovation based on new or existing technology determines the success and competitiveness of the business.

This study investigates the potential effect of economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk, non-oil output, inflation and corporate governance features on insurance companies in Saudi Arabia using quarterly data over the period 2013-2019. More specifically, we apply estimation method panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) to model the long- and short-term relationships. Our empirical results reveal negative short-term effects of geopolitical risk and uncertainty about government economic policy on insurance demand. However, the effect of the latter is not permanent. Our results support the assumed 'demand following theory' in the long-term, which, in turn, is an indication of the fact that the demand for insurance policies is dependent on economic growth and more susceptible to inflation. Our evidence shows that corporate governance has a significant effect on insurance demand in the long term, whereas a Shariah board has no significant impact.

The purpose of this research is to examine whether insurers have improved their economic performance through efficiency as a reaction to the prolonged period of low interest rates. The results of an analysis of 22 years of data, using a two-stage data envelopment analysis approach (DEA), show that there is an inverse relationship between efficiency and interest rate. The non-life insurance group had a superior level of efficiency compared with that of the life insurance group. It seems that life insurance companies, to some extent, transferred their inefficiency to customers to maintain their solvency. Additionally, this research shows that companies with substantial market power and bancassurance exceeded the performance of the rest of the industry.

Cybercrime is estimated to have cost the global economy just under USD 1 trillion in 2020, indicating an increase of more than 50% since 2018. With the average cyber insurance claim rising from USD 145,000 in 2019 to USD 359,000 in 2020, there is a growing necessity for better cyber information sources, standardised databases, mandatory reporting and public awareness. This research analyses the extant academic and industry literature on cybersecurity and cyber risk management with a particular focus on data availability. From a preliminary search resulting in 5219 cyber peer-reviewed studies, the application of the systematic methodology resulted in 79 unique datasets. We posit that the lack of available data on cyber risk poses a serious problem for stakeholders seeking to tackle this issue. In particular, we identify a lacuna in open databases that undermine collective endeavours to better manage this set of risks. The resulting data evaluation and categorisation will support cybersecurity researchers and the insurance industry in their efforts to comprehend, metricise and manage cyber risks.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41288-022-00266-6.