This study further substantiates the presence of insurance underwriting cycles and analyzes their causes. A generalized least squares analysis of changes in premium levels is used to test the rational expectations/institutional intervention hypothesis across countries as well as within each...

Property-liability insurance is distributed by independent agents, who represent several insurers, and exclusive agents, who represent only one insurer. The independent agency system is known to have higher costs than the exclusive agency system. The market imperfections hypothesis attributes...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the capacity of the U.S. property-liability insurance industry to finance major catastrophic property losses. The topic is important because catastrophic events such as the Northridge earthquake and Hurricane Andrew have raised...

The purpose of this paper is to partially fill the gap in the existing literature by conducting an analysis of technical efficiency and productivity growth in the Italian insurance industry. The analysis makes use of a detailed data base on Italian life and non-life insurance companies over the...

This study investigates optimal production and hedging decisions for firms facing price risk that can be hedged with vulnerable contracts, i.e., exposed to nonhedgeable endogenous counterparty credit risk. When vulnerable forward contracts are the only hedging instruments available, the firm's...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to determine the market-value relevance of frontier efficiency scores and to test hypotheses from corporate control and production theory by analyzing the market response to US property–liability (P–L) insurer acquisitions and divestitures....

Public intervention in catastrophe insurance markets, supported by the donor community and the World Bank, should be country specific. Low-income countries, where the domestic non-life insurance market is undeveloped, should focus in the short term on the development of sovereign catastrophe...