This paper analyses the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of forest owners for insurance against natural hazards such as fire. The objective is to identify the determinants of forest owner’s participation to insurance and insurance demand. In particular, we are interested in the impact of different types of public compensation: fixed help, contingent fixed help and insurance subsidy. We also analyse the...

M oral hazard, a long-time concern in the insurance industry, is increasingly being recognized as a concern in the regulation of banking and other financial industries. A classic example of its possible perverse effects is the selling of a fire insurance contract to a group of uninsured individuals. If the premiums are based on the actuarial data of this group’s loss experiences, then the contr...

This paper uses a fire protection measure based on a community’s tire insurance rating to estimate the strength of congestion effects for fire protectron services. The empirical results show that the congestion properties of fire protection are much like those of a pure public good. In addition, the paper introduces a new notion of returns to scale for public goods and estimates the relevant pa...