| Insurance is an important component of the evolving financial services industry. It is also one of the most regulated industries in the U.S. Maintaining insurer solvency has always been a focal point of insurance regulation, and regulators use various methods to promote insurers' financial strength and protect policyholders from losses due to insolvency. Therefore, we take two principal approaches to analyze insurance company financial solvency and capital decisions: first, an econometric analysis of risk-based capital standards for the regulatory oversight of insurance companies, and second, a game-theoretic analysis of the role of informed independent underwriters on an insurer's financial outcomes.;This dissertation contains three essays. The first two essays are concerned with the regulatory role in solvency surveillance in the property-liability insurance industry. The increasing frequency and severity of property-liability insurer insolvencies in the 1980s forced regulators to adopt a series of new regulatory mechanisms, including imposition of Risk Based Capital (RBC) requirements. In the first essay (Chapter 1), we find that the new regulatory Risk Based Capital (RBC) requirements are not very effective in identifying financially distressed companies before their insolvency, and that their limited effectiveness has decreased over time. Because of this finding, in the second essay (Chapter 2), we analyze whether the new regulatory requirements have had an impact on the industry other than in helping to predict insolvency. The results indicate that as a result of new RBC requirements, insurers have modified their behavior to strengthen their capital position, especially financially weak insurers. Thus the new RBC requirements have had a beneficial impact on financially distressed companies, consistent with the goal of the regulation.;In the third essay (Chapter 3), we employ a game-theoretic model to study the financial impact of informed independent underwriters. In a market with a risk-neutral insurer and CARA buyers, we find that the insurer will always do worse by using a risk-neutral underwriter than by operating on a direct-writing basis. However, for an insurer employing mean-variance optimization, the proper combination of underwriter-compensation and capital allocation may lead to better outcomes than direct writing.;We conclude the dissertation in Chapter 4. |
