COVID-19 has demonstrated the challenges that policymakers, insurers, businesses, and employees face when disaster assistance programs are developed after the pandemic has already started. There is now an opportunity to design and implement effective and efficient solutions to manage the...

This paper discusses the recent changes in the market for catastrophe risk. These risks have traditionally been distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance...

This paper examines the market for catastrophe event risk -- i.e., financial claims that are linked to losses associated with natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. This market is in transition as new approaches for transferring risk are being explored. The paper studies several...

Insurance markets often feature consumer sorting along both an extensive margin (whether to buy) and an intensive margin (which plan to buy). We present a new graphical theoretical framework that extends the workhorse model to incorporate both selection margins simultaneously. A key insight from...

This paper examines whether risk-based pricing promotes risk-reducing effort. Such mechanisms are common in private insurance markets, but are rarely incorporated in government assurance programs. We analyze accidental underground fuel tank leaks--a source of environmental damage to water...

This paper proposes long-term insurance (LTI) as an alternative to the standard annual homeowners policy using lessons from the mortgage market as a benchmark. LTI has the potential to significantly increase social welfare by reducing insurers' administrative costs, lowering search costs and...

The devastation caused by hurricanes during the 2004 and 2005 seasons has been unprecedented and is forcing the insurance industry to reevaluate the role that it can play in dealing with future natural disasters in the United States. As shown in Table 1 the four hurricanes that hit Florida in...

Natural catastrophes often have catastrophic risks on insurance companies as well as on the insured. Using a very large dataset on homeowners' insurance coverage by state, by firm, and by year for the 1984 to 2004 period, this paper documents the positive effect on losses and loss ratios of both...

We examine whether unregulated, private insurance markets efficiently provide insurance against reclassification risk (the risk of becoming a bad risk and facing higher premiums). To do so, we examine the ex-post risk type of individuals who drop their long-term care insurance contracts relative...

Most existing studies of risk selection in the employer-sponsored health insurance market are case studies of a single employer or of an employer coalition in a single market. We examine risk selection in the employer-sponsored market by applying a switcher' methodology to a national, panel data...