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Working Paper
Equilibrium with Mutual Organizations in Adverse Selection Economies
Boyd, John H.; Blandin, Adam; Prescott, Edward C. (2015-01-09)
An equilibrium concept in the Debreu (1954) theory-of-value tradition is developed for a class of adverse selection economies and applied to the Spence signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) adverse selection environments. The equilibrium exists and is optimal. Further, all equilibria have the same individual type utility vector. The economies are large with a finite number of types that maximize expected utility on an underlying commodity space. An implication of the analysis is that the invisible hand works for this class of adverse selection economies.
Working Papers , Paper 717

Working Paper
How Data Breaches Affect Consumer Credit
Vogan, Michael; Mikhed, Vyacheslav (2017-03-23)
We use the 2012 South Carolina Department of Revenue data breach as a natural experiment to study how data breaches and news coverage about them affect consumers? interactions with the credit market and their use of credit. We find that some consumers directly exposed to the breach protected themselves against potential losses from future fraudulent use of stolen information by monitoring their files and freezing access to their credit reports. However, these consumers continued their regular use of existing credit cards and did not switch lenders. The response of consumers exposed to the ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-6

Report
The Cost of Financial Frictions for Life Insurers
Koijen, Ralph S. J.; Yogo, Motohiro (2014-06-11)
During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as ?19 percent for annuities and ?57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions, interacting with statutory reserve regulation that allowed life insurers to record far less than a dollar of reserve per dollar of future insurance liability. We identify the shadow cost of capital through exogenous variation in required reserves across different types of policies. The shadow cost was ...
Staff Report , Paper 500

Working Paper
Self-fulfilling Runs: Evidence from the U.S. Life Insurance Industry
Verani, Stéphane; Narajabad, Borghan N.; Foley-Fisher, Nathan (2015-03-25)
Is liquidity creation in shadow banking vulnerable to self-fulfilling runs? Investors typically decide to withdraw simultaneously, making it challenging to identify self-fulfilling runs. In this paper, we exploit the contractual structure of funding agreement-backed securities offered by U.S. life insurers to institutional investors. The contracts allow us to obtain variation in investors' expectations about other investors' actions that is plausibly orthogonal to changes in fundamentals. We find that a run on U.S. life insurers during the summer of 2007 was partly due to self-fulfilling ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-32

Newsletter
How vulnerable are insurance companies to a downturn in the municipal bond market?
Ramnath, Shanthi; Polacek, Andy (2021-02-02)
As the U.S. economy remains weakened by the Covid-19 pandemic, concern persists for the health and resilience of the municipal bond market. Municipal bonds (muni bonds) are debt securities issued by state and local governments to raise money and are generally considered to be safe investments. However, the recent slowdown in economic activity due to Covid-19 created significant stress on state and local government budgets, leading to a heightened risk for municipal bond downgrades and possibly even defaults. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we examine to what extent property and casualty (P&C) and ...
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 451 , Pages 7

Report
Corporate Credit Provision
Mueller, Philippe; Boyarchenko, Nina (2019-08-01)
Productive firms can access credit markets directly by issuing corporate bonds or by borrowing through financial intermediaries. In this paper, we study the cyclical properties of corporate credit provision through these two types of debt instruments in major advanced economies. We argue that the cyclicality of corporate credit is closely related to the cyclicality of the types of financial intermediaries active in the provision of credit. When a debt instrument is held by institutions that manage their balance sheets through debt issuance, credit provision through that instrument is ...
Staff Reports , Paper 895

Report
A post-mortem of the life insurance industry's bid for capital during the financial crisis
Martin, Cynthia; Bohn, James; Barnes, Michelle L. (2015-12-01)
The 2008?2009 financial crisis was the most serious shock to the U.S. financial system since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A number of large financial institutions failed during the crisis. Many institutions that survived did so only because of extraordinary actions undertaken by company management to maintain solvency, or through the extension of extraordinary support by the federal government and the Federal Reserve System. The impact of the financial crisis on the banking sector has been the subject of extensive research, discussion, and debate. Academic and policy researchers, as ...
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 15-8

Report
Patterns of rainfall insurance participation in rural India
Gine, Xavier; Townsend, Robert M.; Vickery, James (2007)
This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, higher among wealthy households, and lower among households that are credit constrained. These results match predictions of a simple neoclassical model appended with borrowing constraints. Other patterns are less consistent with the benchmark model. ...
Staff Reports , Paper 302

Working Paper
Household Financial Decision-Making After Natural Disasters: Evidence from Hurricane Harvey
del Valle, Alejandro; Scharlemann, Tess C.; Shore, Stephen H. (2022-03-25)
Hurricane Harvey brought more than four feet of rainfall to the Houston area in August 2017, leading to substantial flooding in many areas. Using regulatory data with detailed information on borrowing terms, we compare the borrowing response to Hurricane Harvey in parts of Houston that were more and less affected by flooding. We find that hurricane-affected households borrowed in a price-sensitive and time-limited manner, relying almost exclusively on promotional-rate credit cards and mortgage forbearance for new credit and repaying balances quickly. We find that conditional on flooding, ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2022-015

Working Paper
Variable Annuities: Underlying Risks and Sensitivities
Chahboun, Imad; Hoover, Nathaniel (2019-04-09)
This paper presents a quantitative model designed to understand the sensitivity of variable annuity (VA) contracts to market and actuarial assumptions and how these sensitivities make them a potentially important source of risk to insurance companies during times of stress. VA contracts often include long dated guarantees of market performance that expose the insurer to multiple nondiversifiable risks. Our modeling framework employs a Monte Carlo simulation of asset returns and policyholder behavior to derive fair prices for variable annuities in a risk neutral framework and to estimate ...
Supervisory Research and Analysis Working Papers , Paper RPA 19-1

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