Three Essays on Asset Management of Life Insurer Behavior

Download or read book Three Essays on Asset Management of Life Insurer Behavior written by Fu-wei Huang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dissertation, we develop a contingent model to evaluate the equity of a life insurer. The dissertation complements the literature about the insurer's asset-liability matching management in three aspects: credit swap transaction, sunflower behavior, and chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence. The common base of the research approach is based on a contingent claim analysis. The main assumptions of the three issues are, respectively, (i) the invested-asset market and the life insurance market faced by the insurer are assumed imperfectly competitive and a down-and-out call option is developed for the issue of the linkage between insurer behavior and credit swap transaction; (ii) the invested-asset market is assumed to be imperfectly competitive and a utility function based on the standard call option is developed to discuss the sunflower behavior in life insurance management; and (iii) both the invested-asset and life insurance markets are imperfectly competitive and a down-and-out call option is employed to analyze the issue of CEO overconfidence and shadow insurance. The main findings are summarized as follows, respectively. (i) Chapter 2 complements the insurance literature by analyzing how the effects of credit swap transactions on insurer spread behavior and policyholder protection, and how they might differ across various degrees of capital regulation, premature default risk and profit-sharing participation. We find that the policyholder is protected when the insurer as a protection seller benefits risk-taking compensation. (ii) Chapter 3 is the first one to develop a contingent claim model to evaluate the value of the CEO's utility function defined as the like of higher equity return and the dislike of higher equity risk to please the board. The CEO's sunflower aptitude yields lower board utility and makes the CEO more prudent to risk-taking at an increased interest margin for the provision of life insurance policies. (iii) Chapter 4 contributes to the literature on overconfidence behavior by linking shadow insurance and the government's bailout during a financial crisis. We show that there is an efficiency gain from CEO overconfidence to investment and government bailout helps insurer survival. In conclusion, it is shown that the contingent claim approach is intimately relevant to the following three issues in the dissertation: credit swap transaction, sunflower management, and CEO overconfidence.