Download or read book Essays on the Investment Management of Life Insurers written by Kyeonghee Kim and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life insurers play a major role as institutional investors in the financial markets, and their investment behavior receives considerable attention from regulators, policyholders, and participants of financial markets. In this thesis, I examine the investment management of U.S. life insurers. The thesis is comprised of two essays. In the first essay, I study the effects of investment advisor use on life insurers' investment performance. Using a measure of investment performance that accounts for investment risk and regulatory constraints, I find that life insurers experience an economically and statistically significant increase in investment returns when they start using an investment advisor. The performance increase, however, disappears over time. The investment performance effect of an investment advisor is not observed for life insurers that continuously use an investment advisor nor life insurers that switch away from using an investment advisor during the sample period. The results are robust to potential selection issues and alternative explanations. In the second essay, I study a unique type of reinsurance, modified coinsurance, which enables life insurance companies to transfer their investment risk to the reinsurer. When this reinsurance is arranged with an unaffiliated reinsurer or with affiliated foreign reinsurers, it provides risk-based capital (RBC) relief for life insurers with risky assets. I find that life insurers using this RBC-relief reinsurance hold more risky bonds but less capital than life insurers that do not use this type of reinsurance. Our findings, however, are not free of endogeneity problems because life insurers are not randomly assigned to use RBC-relief reinsurance and a life insurer's investment and capital decisions are jointly determined based on their regulatory capital requirements. In future work, I will use exogenous shocks to the bonds that life insurers hold to identify the causality between a life insurer's use of RBC-relief reinsurance and its investment and capital decisions.