This paper proposes new metrics for the process of price discovery on the main electronic trading platform for euro-denominated government securities. Analysing price data on daily transactions for 107 bonds over a period of 27months, we find a greater degree of price leadership of the dominant market when our measures (as opposed to the traditional price discovery metrics) are used. We also present unambiguous evidence that a market’s contribution to price discovery is crucially affected by the level of trading activity. The implications of these empirical findings are discussed in the light of the debate about the possible restructuring of the regulatory framework for the Treasury bond market in Europe.

This paper estimates a reduced-form model to assess the insolvency risk of General Insurance (GI) firms in the UK. In comparison to earlier studies, it uses a much larger sample including 30 years of data for 515 firms, and also considers a much wider set of possible determinants of insolvency risk. The empirical results suggest that macroeconomic and firm-specific factors both play important roles. Other key findings are the following: insolvency risk varies across firms depending on their business lines; there is default clustering in the GI industry; different reinsurance levels also affect the insolvency risk of insurance firms. The implications of these findings for regulators of GI firms under the newly launched Solvency II are discussed.