Abstract
Structured finance boomed during the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Highly rated, structured securities offered higher yield than other similarly rated bonds because of their concentration of systematic risk, but regulatory capital requirements did not account for this risk. As a result, regulated entities facing capital constraints had an incentive to invest in them. We show that life insurance companies exposed to unrealized losses from low interest rates in the early 2000s increased their holdings of highly rated securitized assets, consistent with regulatory arbitrage distorting the demand to hold these assets. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.
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