The Impact of the Monetary Policy Interventions on the Insurance Industry

This paper investigates the effect of the conventional and unconventional (e.g. Quantitative Easing) monetary policy intervention on the insurance industry. We first analyse the impact on the stock performances of 166 (re)insurers of the last Quantitative Easing programme launched by the ECB by constructing an event study around the announcement date. Then we enlarge the scope by looking at the monetary policy surprise effects on the same sample of (re)insurers over a timeframe of 8 years. Our evidences suggest that a single intervention extrapolated from the comprehensive strategy cannot be utilized to estimate the effect of the monetary policy intervention on the market. On the impact of monetary policies we show how the effect of interventions changes over time.