Insurance and geopolitical risk: Fresh empirical evidence

Abstract

Researchers continue to debate on how geopolitical events affect financial development. We contribute to this debate by questioning the possibility of asymmetric linkages between the geopolitical risk index and insurance premium for 14 countries over the annual period of 2000−2019. Using the most up-to-date non-linear autoregressive distributed lag framework, we simultaneously examine short- and long-run asymmetric responses of insurance premiums through positive and negative partial sum decompositions of changes in the geopolitical risk index. Our findings point out that the geopolitical risk affects insurance premiums in an asymmetric and nonlinear manner, except for India, but the transmission mechanism is not the same. In addition, for most emerging countries, we show that the impact is considerably greater in the long- run than in the short-run. Finally, the results support the demand following hypothesis for some of the countries included in our sample. The study recommends the insurers and policymakers to consider the asymmetric dynamics of insurance premium to minimize risk related to long – run negative global and domestic geopolitical uncertainty.