India's crop insurance program is the world's largest with 25 million farmers insured. However, issues in design, particularly related to delays in claims settlement, have led to 95 million farmer households not being covered, despite significant government subsidy. To address this and other...

Designing and rating insurance products requires both science and judgment. In developing and emerging economies, actuarial procedures must be robust and implementable, as well as offering a sufficient degree of transparency and flexibility so as to allow expert judgment to be incorporated. This...

The weather index insurance market in India is the world's largest, having transitioned from small-scale and scattered pilots to a large-scale weather based crop insurance program covering more than 9 million farmers. This paper provides a critical overview of this market, including a review of...

Rational demand for hedging products, where there is a risk of contractual nonperformance, is fundamentally different to that for indemnity insurance.  In particular, optimal demand is zero for infinitely risk averse individuals, and is nonmonotonic in risk aversion, wealth and price.  For...

This paper analyses collusion-proof multilateral insurance contracts between a risk neutral insurer and multiple risk averse agents in an environment of asymmetric costly state verification.  Optimal contracts involve the group of agents pooling uncertainty and the insurer acting as reinsurer...

The African Risk Capacity (ARC), has been proposed as a pan-Africa drought risk pool to insure against drought risk in Africa south of the Sahara. If fully operationalized, the ARC will mark a major change in how donors fund emergency support to countries in Africa during times of need. In this...