This article analyzes the economic functions of independent insurance intermediaries (brokers and independent agents), focusing on the commercial property-casualty insurance market. The article investigates the functions performed by intermediaries, the competitiveness of the market, the...

Although an extensive literature has developed on modeling the loss reserve runoff triangle, the estimation of severity distributions applicable to claims settled in specific cells of the runoff triangle has received little attention in the literature. This paper proposes the use of a very...

The demand for insurance is examined when the indemnity schedule is subject to an upper limit. The optimal contract is shown to display full insurance above a deductible up to the cap. Some results derived in the standard model with no upper limit on coverage turn out to be invalid; the optimal...

This article presents new evidence on the cost of equity capital by line of insurance for the property-liability insurance industry. To do so we obtain firm beta estimates and then use the full-information industry beta (FIB) methodology to decompose the cost of capital by line. We obtain...