The authors identify the key issues and concerns that arise in the design and rating of crop yield insurance plans, with a particular emphasis on production risk modeling. The authors show how the availability of data shapes the insurance scheme and the ratemaking procedures. Relying on the U.S....

The March 2011 earthquake that hit east Japan was the fourth-largest ever recorded. It was not only a human tragedy but an economic shock with losses estimated in excess of 16,900 billion Chinese yuan, making it the costliest disaster in history. Despite this, the Japanese insurance industry is...

Governments in developing countries have been increasingly involved in the support of commercial agricultural (crop and livestock) insurance programs in recent years. A striking example is China, where, with support (and premium subsidies) from the central and provincial governments, the...

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...

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...

This paper proposes a framework for ex ante evaluation of sovereign disaster risk finance instruments available to governments for funding disaster losses. The framework can be used by governments to help choose between different financial instruments, or between different combinations of...