Helmut Gründl’s research while affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt and other places

We analyze insurance market outcomes and customer utility under asymmetric information when customers have heterogeneous privacy concerns and access to a screening technology that permits their private information to be revealed. If the market outcome without the technology is of the Rothschild–Stiglitz type, so too is the market outcome with the technology for those who do not submit to the screening technology and thus retain their private information. Low‐risk customers who reveal their private information are better off and those who do not reveal their risk type are no worse off, resulting in a Pareto improvement. If, however, the market outcome without the technology is of the Wilson–Miyazaki–Spence type, the market may no longer exhibit cross‐subsidies after the screening technology is introduced. In this case, low‐risk customers who reveal their risk type are better off, but this is at the expense of those who do not reveal their risk type, who are worse off due to intensified adverse selection. The negative externality on those who do not reveal their risk type can outweigh the utility gains of those low‐risk customers who do reveal their risk type, resulting in lower expected welfare. In this case, a privacy law would improve expected welfare.

Market risks account for an integral part of insurers' risk profiles. We explore market risk sensitivities of insurers in the United States and Europe. Based on panel regression models and daily market data from 2012 to 2018, we find that sensitivities are particularly driven by insurers' product portfolio. The influence of interest rate movements on stock returns is 60% larger for US than for European life insurers. For the former, interest rate risk is a dominant market risk with an effect that is five times larger than through corporate credit risk. For European life insurers, the sensitivity to interest rate changes is only 44% larger than toward credit default swap of government bonds, underlining the relevance of sovereign credit risk.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) continues to gain momentum in the financial market space for various reasons, starting with the looming effect of climate change and the drive toward a net-zero economy. Existing SRI approaches have included environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria as a further dimension to portfolio selection, but these approaches focus on classical investors and do not account for specific aspects of insurance companies. In this paper, we consider the stock selection problem of life insurance companies. In addition to stock risk, our model set-up includes other important market risk categories of insurers, namely interest rate risk and credit risk. In line with common standards in insurance solvency regulation, such as Solvency II, we measure risk using the solvency ratio, i.e. the ratio of the insurer's market-based equity capital to the Value-at-Risk of all modeled risk categories. As a consequence, we employ a modification of Markowitz's Portfolio Selection Theory by choosing the ``solvency ratio" as a downside risk measure to obtain a feasible set of optimal portfolios in a three-dimensional (risk, return, and ESG) capital allocation plane. We find that for a given solvency ratio, stock portfolios with a moderate ESG level can lead to a higher expected return than those with a low ESG level. A highly ambitious ESG level, however, reduces the expected return. Because of the specific nature of a life insurer's business model, the impact of the ESG level on the expected return of life insurers can substantially differ from the corresponding impact for classical investors.

In this article we analyse the European Commission's proposals as regards the Solvency II Review (published in September 2021) in respect of its risk-basedness. We try to definie risk-based in the context of a supervision and regulation for insurance undertakings and groups in the EU. Then we structure our analysis along certain areas as risk measure, sustainability or macro prudential tools. We conclude that in general the European Commission sticks to a risk-based approach for the reviewed Solvency II regime.

This paper analyzes the scope of the private market for pandemic insurance. We develop a framework that explains theoretically how the equilibrium price of pandemic insurance depends on accumulation risk, covariance between pandemic claims and other claims, and covariance between pandemic claims and the stock market performance. Using the natural catastrophe (NatCat) insurance market as a laboratory, we estimate the relationship between the insurance price markup and the tail characteristics of the loss distribution. Then, by using the high‐frequency data tracking the economic impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United States, we calibrate the loss distribution of a hypothetical insurance contract designed to alleviate the impact of the pandemic on small businesses. The pandemic insurance contract price markup corresponds to the top 20% markup observed in the NatCat insurance market. Then we analyze an intertemporal risk‐sharing scheme that can reduce the expected shortfall of the loss distribution by 50%.