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Innovations and institutions : an institutional perspective on the innovative efforts of banks and insurance companies
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ISBN: 0415390737 9780203964057 9780415390736 0203964055 9781134167432 9781134167470 9781134167487 9780415541466 Year: 2007 Volume: 4 Publisher: London Routledge

When insurers go bust
Authors: ---
ISBN: 9780691129358 0691129355 9786612129735 1282129732 1400827779 0691170983 9781400827770 9781282129733 Year: 2007 Publisher: Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press

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Abstract

In the 1990's, large insurance companies failed in virtually every major market, prompting a fierce and ongoing debate about how to better protect policyholders. Drawing lessons from the failures of four insurance companies, When Insurers Go Bust dramatically advances this debate by arguing that the current approach to insurance regulation should be replaced with mechanisms that replicate the governance of non-financial firms. Rather than immediately addressing the minutiae of supervision, Guillaume Plantin and Jean-Charles Rochet first identify a fundamental economic rationale for supervising the solvency of insurance companies: policyholders are the "bankers" of insurance companies. But because policyholders are too dispersed to effectively monitor insurers, it might be efficient to delegate monitoring to an institution--a prudential authority. Applying recent developments in corporate finance theory and the economic theory of organizations, the authors describe in practical terms how such authorities could be created and given the incentives to behave exactly like bankers behave toward borrowers, as "tough" claimholders.

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