Reinsurance, Insurability and the New Paradigms of Unconventional Risk Transfer

This chapter explores traditional and innovative techniques to cover CAT risks, from traditional Reinsurance to Market Transfer and Insurance Linked Securities. The handbook as a whole examines the latest techniques and strategies that are used to unlock the risk transfer capacity of global financial and capital markets. Taking the financial crisis and global recession into account, it frames and contextualises non-traditional risk transfer tools created over the last 20 years. Featuring contributions from distinguished academics and professionals from around the world, this book covers in detail issues in securitization, financial risk management and innovation, structured finance and derivatives, life and non-life pure risk management, market and financial reinsurance, CAT risk management, crisis management, natural, environmental and man-made risks, terrorism risk, risk modelling, vulnerability and resilience. This handbook will be of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners in the field of risk transfer

A model of corporate liquidity

We study a continuous time model of a levered firm with fixed assets generating a cash flow which fluctuates with business conditions. Since external finance is costly, the firm holds a liquid (cash) reserve to help survive periods of poor business conditions. Holding liquid assets inside the firm is costly as some of the return on such assets is dissipated due to agency problems. We solve for the firms optimal dividend, share issuance, and liquid asset holding policies. The firm optimally targets a level of liquid assets which is a non-monotonic function of business conditions. In good times, the firm does not need a high liquidity reserve, but as conditions deteriorate, it will target higher reserve. In very poor conditions, the firm will declare bankruptcy, usually after it has depleted its liquidity reserve. Our model can predict liquidity holdings, leverage ratios, yield spreads, expected default probabilities, expected loss given default and equity volatilities all in line with market experience. We apply the model to examine agency conflicts associated with the liquidity re-serve, and some associated debt covenants. We see that a restrictive covenant applied to the liquidity reserve will often enhance the debt value as well as the equity value