IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qsh/wpaper/390221.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Asset Insulators

Author

Listed:
  • Gabriel Chodorow-Reich
  • Andra Ghent
  • Valentin Haddad

Abstract

We propose that financial institutions can act as asset insulators, holding assets for the long run to protect their valuations from consequences of exposure to financial markets. We illustrate the empirical relevance of this theory for the balance sheet behavior of a large class of intermediaries, life insurance companies. The pass-through from assets to equity is an especially informative metric for distinguishing the asset insulator theory from Modigliani-Miller or other standard models. We estimate the pass-through using security-level data on insurers' holdings matched to corporate bond returns. Uniquely consistent with the insulator view, outside of the 2008-2009 crisis insurers lose as little as 10 cents in response to a dollar drop in asset values, while during the crisis the pass-through rises to roughly 1. The rise in pass-through highlights the fragility of insulation exactly when it is most valuable.

Suggested Citation

  • Gabriel Chodorow-Reich & Andra Ghent & Valentin Haddad, 2016. "Asset Insulators," Working Paper 390221, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    • Handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:390221
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://scholar.harvard.edu/chodorow-reich/node/390221
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Irani, Rustom & Iyer, Rajkamal & Meisenzahl, Ralf & Peydró, José-Luis, 2021. "The rise of shadow banking: Evidence from capital regulation," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 34(5), pages 2181-2235.
    2. Nicola Fusari & Wei Li & Haoyang Liu & Zhaogang Song, 2020. "Asset Pricing with Cohort-Based Trading in MBS Markets," Staff Reports 931, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    3. Andrew Ellul & Chotibhak Jotikasthira & Anastasia Kartasheva & Christian T Lundblad & Wolf Wagner, 2022. "Insurers as Asset Managers and Systemic Risk," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(12), pages 5483-5534.
    4. Timmer, Yannick, 2018. "Cyclical investment behavior across financial institutions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(2), pages 268-286.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:390221. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Richard Brandon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbrssus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.