Systemic Risk and the Insurance Industy: Principal Linkages and Dependencies

With respect to the insurance sector, Eling and Pankoke (2014) review 43 theoretical and empirical research papers on systemic risk and suggest several other areas of research that would be useful in this field. We build upon and extend the results by Eling and Pankoke (2014) as follows: After a discussion of the term ‘systemic risk' and a review of the extant research results on systemic risk in the insurance sector, we analyse the implications of this discussion for macroprudential supervision. For this purpose, we evaluate the relevance of banking-sector macroprudential instruments to the insurance sector. Moreover, we discuss to what extent systemic risk might be triggered by regulation itself, especially by Solvency II, the forthcoming European-wide regulatory framework for risk-based capital. Finally, in the last section we provide a summary of the points made in this chapter.