Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...

This paper identifies the risk and risk-adjusted return determinants of US insurers. We find that the significant firm-specific determinants for risk and risk-adjusted return vary slightly for the risk proxy and risk-adjusted return proxy used, and the types of insurers. We find that in general,...

This paper is the first to examine the effects of consolidation in the international insurance industry on the acquirers' contribution to systemic risk. We analyze a sample of 394 international domestic and cross-border mergers and find a strong positive relation between consolidation in the...