Summary |
This book is the result of a project begun at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center in 1996 on Managing Catastrophic Risks. The project in its early days was concerned with the role of insurance and capital markets in managing catastrophic risks arising from natural hazards. Given recent events, the project has expanded its focus to deal with terrorism and other extreme events, under the project name “Managing and Financing Extreme Events”.
This has been an ambitious undertaking, and the present volume represents only one of several research initiatives in the overall project. To provide some sense of the scope of the project, authors note here the five major activities that have been undertaken under the auspices of this project.
1. Mitigation of hazards via building and other retrofits
2. Insurance regulation and industry analysis.
3. Securitization of insurance risk.
4. Measuring the capacity of insurance and reinsurance markets to respond to catastrophic losses.
5. Interdependent security risk
This monograph presents the results of the first significant attempt to examine empirically the nature of the demand for insurance against natural disasters at a detailed, microeconomic level within a regulated market.
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