We investigate the impact of the 20 largest - in terms of insured losses - man-made or natural disasters on various insurance industry stock indices. We show via an event study that insurance sectors worldwide are quite resilient, in a market-value sense, to unexpected losses to capital: our...

Natural disasters can put severe strain on public finances, in particular in developing and small countries. But catastrophe insurance markets increasingly offer opportunities for the transfer of such risks. Thus far, developing countries have only tepidly begun to tap these opportunities. More...

It is widely recognized that market failure prevents efficient risk sharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countries adopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation, often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection as a...

Each year natural disasters affect about 200 million people and cause about $50 billion in damage. This paper compares the incidence of natural disasters across countries along several dimensions and finds that the relative costs tend to be far higher in developing countries than in advanced...

This paper looks at the quot;voluntary targetsquot; (VT) proposal and its extensions that have been put forward as a possible architecture of the post-2012 climate change mitigation regime. This proposal is unique in that it takes the principle of quot;common but differentiated...

This paper examines the relationship between corporate activities to address climate change and stock performance. By separately analyzing the US and European stock markets for different sub-periods, we highlight the impact of the underlying climate policy regime. Methodologically, we compare...

Adapting to climate change will not only require responding to the physical effects of global warming, but will also require adapting the way we conceptualize, measure, and manage risks. Climate change is creating new risks, altering the risks we already face, and also, importantly, impacting...

This article evaluates the impact of the 2006 compliance event on changes in investors' risk aversion on the European Carbon Market using the newly available option prices dataset. Thus, we aim at capturing the specific event that occurred on April 2007 as the European Commission disclosed the...

This paper examines the history of St. Louis, Missouri in coping with flood risk over the past 15 years, with a focus on flood insurance. Six challenges to the continued management of riverine flood risk are identified and discussed. They are (1) many property owners don't buy flood insurance,...

In this paper we explore whether increased coastal building standards imposed by federal and state level initiatives are effective in mitigating losses to coastal property. We first examine if the coastal building code regime under which a property is constructed affects the likelihood of...