On September 23, 2025, the SCOR Foundation for Science held a webinar titled: “The challenges of estimating insurance assets and liabilities, and the relevant discount rate.” The webinar was hosted by Christian Gollier, Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, of which he is Executive Director. 

The webinar looked in detail at how the conjunction of factors such as quantitative easing, the increased share of public debt in central banks’ assets, the increased debtor position of commercial banks vis-à-vis central banks, and expanding public debt around the world, are making it more difficult to estimate the risk-free interest rates and discount rates used to value risky assets and liabilities, by weakening or even undermining the reference to the sovereign interest rate as a first rough approximation of the risk-free interest rate.

Christian Gollier is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, of which is Executive Director. He is the lead author of the 4th and 5th reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a former President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and a winner of the Paul A. Samuelson Award. He is one of the world’s leading economists on the economics of risk, finance, and climate change.