Natural disasters are an important source of vulnerability in the Caribbean region. Despite being one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world, it has the lowest levels of insurance coverage. This paper examines the vulnerability of Belize's public finance to the occurrence of hurricanes...

After the flooding in 2002 European governments provided billions of Euros of financial assistance to their citizens. Although there is no doubt that solidarity and some sort of assistance is reasonable, the question arises why these damages were not sufficiently insured. One explanation why...

Catastrophe insurance markets have changed beyond recognition since the sudden upturn in claims beginning in 1966. There is now a growing tendency for risk manager to bypass traditional insurance markets, and a variety of instruments designed directly to transfer risk to the financial markets....

The use of structural models for decision-making under risk and uncertainty in applied economics is scarce compared to reduced form approaches. This is unfortunate, as structural models have clear connections to theory and permit direct tests of hypotheses and exploration of potential causal...

The United Nations Sendai (2015) framework aims to reduce disaster risk. We offer a careful definition and computation of the individual and property risk targets. Selecting the largest and better studied class of “natural disasters” over the period 1970-2018, we show that individual risk is...

The paper analyzes the scope for the private market for pandemic insurance and discusses the potential role of the financial market and the government. Building on a premise that pandemics are classified as catastrophic risks by the insurance industry, we start by providing a framework that...

In the wake of several high-profile natural disasters, crowding effects between public relief and private investments in disaster preparedness have recently attracted renewed attention. We examine how non-hypothetical self-insurance behavior by households responds to variations in public...

Our paper analyses the effect of natural catastrophes on insurance demand in a developing economy and the specific role of insurance regulation in this relationship. We base our analysis on a theoretical model as well as a panel regression using household survey level data for Vietnam and...