INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND EUROPEAN CAPITAL MARKETS. THE CASE OF CATASTROPHE BONDS AND LISTED REINSURANCE COMPANIES

Abstract

Focusing on the financial innovation – stock market interconnections, the present research studies the association between the insurance-linked market activity of European (re)insurance companies and their evolution on the capital markets. With the aim of emphasizing the connections from the perspective of the stock performance and their risk, the empirical analysis is based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality analyses. The proposed examination is further developed by considering both impulse response functions and variance decomposition insights. The proxies of the catastrophe bond market, as financial innovation, there are employed both the size and the number of catastrophe bonds transactions, while the stock returns and their standard deviation stand for representatives of the evolution of the reinsurance companies on the capital markets in terms of financial performance and risk. The main results confirm other studies, suggesting that the effects of issuing cat bonds on the ceding companies is reflected rather in terms of stocks’ risk diminishing.

Keywords

• catastrophe bonds
• financial performance
• risk
• reinsurance EU market