Risk Transfer and the Insurance Industry
This paper asks whether the transfer of risk from banking to non-banking institutions, such as insurers, has reduced risk for the financial system as a whole or merely shifted it to less transparent sectors. If the latter is the case, then it may be that new forms of risk and vulnerability are being introduced into the global financial system.
The Insurance Industry, Systemic Financial Stability, and Fair Value Accounting
The insurance industry has become more important for systemic ﬁnancial stability. As a result, the supervision and disclosure of ﬁnancial risks of insurance companies need to be strengthened. The insurance industry’s increasing systemic importance also suggests that there is a need to search for some middle ground in the discussion of fair value accounting to mitigate potentially destabilizing ﬁnancial volatility.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.