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 … "blockbuster catastrophes." Insurers adapt to these catastrophic risks by raising insurance rates, leading to lower loss ratios …

State guaranty funds are quasi-governmental agencies that provide insurance to policyholders against the risk of … insurance company failure. But insurance provided by guaranty funds, like all insurance, creates moral hazard problems … insurance companies to borrow money (i.e., from policyholders). Moreover, the existence of guaranty fund insurance enables …

Home equity insurance policies, policies insuring homeowners against declines in the price of their homes, would bear … some resemblance both to ordinary insurance and to financial hedging vehicles. A menu of choices for the design of such … insurance company in effect serves as a retailer to homeowners of short positions in real estate futures markets or of put …

distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small … amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance companies' capital is threatened by large event, these risks are now …

Insurance markets often feature consumer sorting along both an extensive margin (whether to buy) and an intensive …

insurance markets, but are rarely incorporated in government assurance programs. We analyze accidental underground fuel tank …-level government assurance program and switching to private insurance markets to finance cleanups reduced the frequency of costly …

This paper proposes long-term insurance (LTI) as an alternative to the standard annual homeowners policy using lessons …

insurance industry to reevaluate the role that it can play in dealing with future natural disasters in the United States. As …The first section of the paper addresses the first question by outlining two principles on which a disaster insurance … question and delineates the opportunities and challenges of a comprehensive disaster insurance program. Section 5 poses a set …

We examine whether unregulated, private insurance markets efficiently provide insurance against reclassification risk … drop their long-term care insurance contracts relative to those who are continually insured. Consistent with dynamic … in private insurance markets can preclude the efficient provision of insurance against reclassification risk …