The Life Insurance Industry and Systemic Risk: A Bond Market Perspective
本文从债券市场视角探讨寿险公司是否可能引发系统性风险，发现寿险公司倾向于在债券流动性较差时买入以吸收流动性风险，但未发现其在金融危机期间增加债券购买，因此其未来危机中的稳定作用存疑。
The 2008 financial crisis brought a focus on the potential for a large insurance firm to contribute to systemic risk. Among the concerns raised was that a negative shock to insurers could lead to a fire sale of corporate bonds, a market where insurers are among the largest participants. This manuscript discusses the existing evidence on life insurance firms and systemic risk, with a focus on the investment-grade corporate bond market. We provide some tentative evidence that life insurers tend to absorb liquidity risk by purchasing bonds when the bonds are less liquid than average. However, we do not find evidence that insurers increased bond purchases specifically during the financial crisis, leaving open the question of whether insurers would play a stabilizing role in a future crisis.