This paper deals with the role of insurance for damages from catastrophic events. Prior to the attack of September 11, 2001, insurers typically provided coverage for losses from terrorism and those from almost all other causes. These causes were thought by the industry to be of sufficiently low probability and were not a reason for making changes in premiums, underwriting, or reserves. In times...

The quest for a practical index of relative body weight that began shortly after actuaries reported the increased mortality of their overweight policyholders culminated after World War II, when the relationship between weight and cardiovascular disease became the subject of epidemiological studies. It became evident then that the best index was the ratio of the weight in kilograms divided by th...

This paper studies a unique panel dataset of transactions with repeat customers of an insurer operating in a market in which insurers are not required by law or contract to share information about their customers’ records. I use this dataset to test the asymmetric learning hypothesis that sellers obtain over time private information that some of their repeat customers have low risk, and that th...

In this paper we present and evaluate a Gibbs sampler for a Poisson regression model including spatial effects. The approach is based on Frühwirth-Schnatter and Wagner (2004b) who show that by data augmentation using the introduction of two sequences of latent variables a Poisson regression model can be transformed into an approximate normal linear model. We show how this methodology can be ext...

In this paper, we focus on the calibration of affine stochastic mortality models using insurance contracts premiums. Viewing insurance contracts as “market products,” we propose fitting stochastic models on the quotes of insurance policies. For this purpose, insurance contracts are viewed as a “swap” in which policyholders exchange cash flows (premiums vs. benefits) with an insurer analogous to...

In property and casualty insurance, claims management is featured with modeling of semicontinuous insurance cost associated with individual risk transfer. This practice is further complicated by the multilevel structure of the insurance claims data, where a contract often contains a group of policyholders, each policyholder is insured under multiple types of coverage, and the contract is repeat...

BACKGROUND We study the longevity and medical resource usage of a large sample of insureds aged 65 years or older drawn from a large health insurance dataset. Yearly counts of each subject's emergency room and ambulance service use and hospital admissions are made. Occurrence of mortality is also monitored. The study aims to capture the simultaneous dependence between their demand for healthcar...

Variable annuities have grown tremendously in recent years, offering life insurers significant growth opportunities. These equity and interest rate structured products offer a broad range of guarantees to the policyholders, and insurers must manage their risks. The insurer’s risk management program must consider modeling and implementation challenges beyond that of the standard capital market a...

PURPOSE The purpose of this report is to provide basic descriptive information on community-dwelling, disabled, private long-term care (LTC) insurance policyholders who have accessed policy benefits. We focus on how benefits are used, whether claimants feel they are getting appropriate value from their policies, and what the patterns are of formal and informal service use. DESIGN AND METHODS ...

The IPCC 2007 report noted that both the frequency and strength of hurricanes, floods and droughts have increased during the past few years. Thus, climate risk, and more specifically natural catastrophes, are now hardly insurable: losses can be huge (and the actuarial pure premium might even be infinite), diversification through the central limit theorem is not possible because of geographical ...