This paper discusses the recent changes in the market for catastrophe risk. These risks have traditionally been distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance...

This paper examines the market for catastrophe event risk -- i.e., financial claims that are linked to losses associated with natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. This market is in transition as new approaches for transferring risk are being explored. The paper studies several...

This paper builds on Froot and Stein (1998) in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market...

This paper examines the market for catastrophe event risk i.e., financial claims that are linked to losses associated with natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Risk management theory suggests protection by insurers and other corporations against the largest cat events is most...

We compare various forms of market-based debt relief with coordinated debt forgiveness on the part of creditors. These schemes lead to different allocations of resources and levels of debtor and creditor welfare, but all attempt to stimulate debtor investment through reductions in the level of...

Survey data on interest rate expectations are used to separate the forward interest rate into an expected future rate and a term premium. These components are used to test separately two competing alternative hypotheses in tests of the term structure: that the expectations hypothesis does not...

This paper investigates the effects of imperfectly credible trade liberalization programs on welfare and the allocation of real resources. We present a rational expectations model in which a government, with limited access to international financial markets may be forced to abort a...

Survey data on exchange rate expectations are used to divide the forward discount into expected depreciation and a risk premium. Our starting point is the common test oh whether the forward discount is an unbiased predictor of future changes in the spot rate. We use the surveys to decompose the...

Survey data provide a measure of exchange rate expectations that is superior to the commonly-used forward exchange rate in the respect that it does notinclude a risk premium. We use survey data and the technique of bootstrapping to test a number of propositions of interest. We are able to reject...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ?informed trading hypothesis?: that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of investors who believe they have...