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The purpose of this paper is to test for the existence of residual moral hazard in the three largest US reinsurance markets over the period 1995‐2000 and examine the effectiveness of retention limit, experience rating and long‐term contracting relationship in controlling for moral hazard.

This paper focuses on one peculiar feature in the insurance industry, group affiliation, and tests the presence of residual moral hazard in reinsurance markets. This approach may enable moral hazard to be separated from adverse selection. Moreover, two different econometric methods are employed for the empirical tests: the non‐parametric matching estimators method and the parametric fixed effects model, which may enhance the robustness of the results.

The author finds that, over the period 1995‐2000, residual moral hazard does not exist in the private passenger auto liability and product liability reinsurance markets, but might exist in the homeowners reinsurance market. This finding suggests that the US reinsurance markets are efficient overall and moral hazard is not a serious issue over this period of time. In addition, the author finds that retention limit is effectively used by reinsurers to mitigate the moral hazard problem, whereas experience rating and long‐term contracting relationship are either not used or not effective in controlling the loss experience of reinsurance.

US reinsurance markets are efficient overall and moral hazard is not a serious issue.

The significance of this paper is multifaceted. First, it investigates moral hazard in reinsurance markets by examining internal and external reinsurance jointly. Second, instead of directly examining the correlation between risk and coverage, this paper tests for the presence of residual moral hazard in reinsurance markets. Moreover, the author employs two different econometric methods: the non‐parametric matching estimators method and the parametric fixed effects model, which may enhance the robustness of the results. Third, the use of panel data makes it possible to explore the roles of retention limit, experience rating and long‐term contracting relationship in mitigating the moral hazard problem.

This article aims to examine the existence of an underwriting cycle in property‐liability insurance for France, Germany and Switzerland (primary markets) and for the European reinsurance industry. It is also aimed to test how the two markets are related with each other in each country and how they influence each other.

Loss ratio data for France, Germany and Switzerland are used for the recent period 1982‐2001 in connection with the price of reinsurance in Europe as well as the money market rate. To test for the existence of cycles and calculate their length auto‐regressive processes of second order are applied.

There are cross‐country differences for the primary markets of the three countries. The reinsurance price index is highly cyclical with a calculated cycle length of almost nine years. It is shown that the reinsurance price index has a strong influence on the primary market loss ratios of the three countries studied.

With the exception of two studies examining the impact of reinsurance on insurance prices and profits, there has been no research as yet to determine the role of reinsurance on the cyclical behavior of underwriting results. This gap is filled here by an empirical study on three European countries.

Property and casualty (“P&C”) insurance companies rely on “risk capital” to absorb large losses that unexpectedly deplete claims‐paying resources and reduce underwriting capacity. The purpose of this paper is to review the similarities and differences between two different types of risk capital raised by insurers to cover losses arising from natural catastrophes: internal risk capital provided by investors in insurance company debt and equity; and external risk capital provided by third parties. The paper also explores the distinctions between four types of external catastrophe risk capital: reinsurance, industry loss warranties, catastrophe derivatives, and insurance‐linked securities. Finally, how the credit crisis has impacted alternative sources of catastrophe risk capital in different ways is considered.

The discussion is based on the conceptual framework for analyzing risk capital developed by Merton and Perold.

In 2008, the P&C insurance industry was adversely affected by significant natural catastrophe‐related losses, floundering investments, and limited access to capital markets, all of which put upward pressure on catastrophe reinsurance premiums. But the influx of new risk capital that generally accompanies hardening markets has been slower than usual to occur in the wake of the credit crisis. Meanwhile, disparities between the relative costs and benefits of alternative sources of catastrophe risk capital are even more pronounced than usual.

Although many insurance companies focus on how much reinsurance to buy, this paper emphasizes that a more important question is how much risk capital to acquire from external parties (and in what form) vis‐à‐vis investors in the insurance company's own securities.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between geographical diversification and the underwriting performance for the world's largest reinsurance groups. It also aims to verify that the form and nature of the relationship between diversification and performance follow an S‐shaped curve with increased diversification of the largest reinsurance groups.

Analysis in the paper is based on the concept of Geographical Spread Index defined and calculated by UNCTAD. Data on largest reinsurance groups in the world are published annually by Standard & Poor's for only a limited number of reinsurance groups. To overcome the small sample problem, a re‐sampling procedure from the original sample, similar to a bootstrap sample, is used to validate the results.

The results show that, overall, international geographical diversification has a positive effect on a reinsurance firm's underwriting performance but that this relationship is not linear. It rather follows an S‐shaped curve. Although data limitation does not allow more sophisticated investigations, the results reported in this paper are nevertheless significant. It seems that at an early stage of expansion in proximate markets there are efficiency gains for the firm. With increased internationalization there may be a diminution in performance because of higher transaction costs or learning costs for new markets. Further expansion in foreign markets brings back efficiency and higher performance.

Only cross‐section data for a small sample of companies are available and therefore it is not possible to analyze the dynamics of geographical diversification. A firm may deliberately expand for long‐term strategy reasons such as market share even though this is detrimental to medium‐run performance. Also, the analysis cannot provide any answer to the existence or not of a maximum level of international diversification beyond which performance would decline.

In the literature on firm diversification in the financial services sector, product diversification and performance has received significant attention with mixed results but except for a few papers, the internationalization aspect has not been examined. The reinsurance sector is important since reinsurance activities are, by nature, more geographically diversified than other financial activities. Furthermore, the largest European reinsurance groups dominate this worldwide market and many reinsurance companies have, in the past decade, increased their foreign direct investment and acquired other companies in part because of the belief that only very large players will have the cost advantages necessary to remain competitive in global markets.

This study is designed to investigate how the use of reinsurance affects the primary insurers' profitability and pricing on their insurance products.

This study examines the impact of reinsurance on the insurers’ profitability using a two stage least square to control the endogeneity problem with a reinsurance variable. The study analyzes 11,894 firm-year observations between 2001 and 2009.

The study finds that the use of reinsurance in general has a negative impact on property/casualty insurers' performance. However, reinsurance obtained from affiliated firms has a positive impact on profitability, which supports the existence of internal capital markets in the insurance industry.

The finding of study implies that reinsurance transactions are used among affiliated insurers for not only managing underwriting risk and increasing underwriting capacity but also subsidizing capital through internal capital markets. In term of limitation, due to the availability of price data, this study uses only one insurance cycle of 9 years, albeit not weakening the findings.

Especially for non-affiliated insurers, the finding suggests that they need to find an alternative way to transfer underwriting risk without having to use costly reinsurance.

This paper directly investigates the impact of reinsurance utilization on insurers' profitability and pricing.

Demonstrates the feasibility of, and introduces a practical approach to enhancing, reinsurance efficiency using index‐based instruments.

First reviews the general mathematical framework of reinsurance optimization. Next, illustrates how index‐based instruments can potentially enhance reinsurance efficiency through a simple yet self‐contained example. The simplicity allows the analytical examination of the cost and benefits of an index‐based contract. Finally, introduces a real‐world model that optimizes index‐based reinsurance instruments using the genetic algorithm.

Identifies the key factors that determine the efficiency of index‐based reinsurance contracts and demonstrates that, in the property catastrophe reinsurance market, the combined effect of these factors frequently allows the construction of an index‐based hedging program that is more efficient than a traditional excess‐of‐loss reinsurance contract. A robust optimization model based on the genetic algorithm is introduced and shown to be effective in optimizing index‐based reinsurance contracts.

Most financial optimization procedures are subject to parameter risk, which can adversely affect the robustness of their solutions. The reinsurance optimization approach presented in this paper is not completely immune from this problem. It remains a challenging problem for actuarial researchers and practitioners.

The concept and method proposed in this paper can be applied to designing real‐world reinsurance programs.

This paper makes two contributions to the risk finance literature: a systematic approach for evaluating the costs and benefits of index‐based reinsurance instruments, and an innovative and practical model for optimizing reinsurance efficiency.

Using a game‐theoretic model of insurance markets, Powers and Shubik in 2001 derived a mathematical expression for the optimal number of reinsurers for a given number of primary insurers. Subsequently in 2005, Powers and Shubik showed analytically that, for large numbers of primary insurers, this expression is effectively a “square‐root rule”, i.e. the optimal number of reinsurers in a market is given asymptotically by the square root of the total number of primary insurers. In this paper, we test the accuracy of the square‐root rule empirically.

The numbers of primary insurers and reinsurers existing in a range of 18‐20 different national insurance markets over a period of 11 years are used.

The empirical results are consistent with the square‐root rule. In addition, we find that the number of reinsurers may also be associated with the market's willingness to pay for risk. When the market's perception of risk is high, there is a greater supply of reinsurance to provide capacity to primary insurers.

An empirical model is presented that deals explicitly with the number of insurers and reinsurers in a market. This is of value to government policymakers and insurance regulators.

Purpose: This chapter is based on risk management of the insurance sector with reinsurance as its linchpin. Such is the importance of the insurance sector that its risk management must be considered.

Need for the study: Risk management of various sectors is gaining much attention. The insurance sector, known to manage the risk of multiple sectors, also requires its own chance to be controlled with the same or even more intensity. Considering the importance of reinsurance coupled with the dependency of primary insurers on reinsurers and the absence of research on reinsurers, the need to conduct a comprehensive study on the topic is felt.

Methodology: It will be a conceptual chapter based on the rigorous literature on the topic integrated with the researcher’s insights to bring forth the framework of reinsurers for the readers.

Findings: It is found that insurers can themselves become the victims of the financial crisis in case they insure risks that surpass their economic boundaries. Not only this, the failure of insurance companies can have a ripple effect on the country’s economy. Therefore, insurers must possess financial resilience; to remain so, they need to have prudent management of the risk they are undertaking.

Practical implications: The study covers a relatively less researched area of reinsurance and hence has a vast scope of research in the future. The study would be helpful to stakeholders like regulators and primary insurers. It will unveil the paradigm of reinsurance and enlighten the stakeholders on how to use it effectively.

This study aims to analyse the following: first, the financial performance of General Insurance Re (GIC Re) using performance ratios (PRs); second, the uniformity of different financial performance indicators of GIC Re; third, the internal growth capacity of GIC Re; and finally, the likelihood of GIC Re going into financial distress.

As a sample, GIC Re, the lion shareholder in Indian Reinsurance Industry has been considered in the present study. All the necessary data have been extracted from the secondary sources over a time period of 16 years. The financial performance of GIC Re is assessed using five standard ratios, and the uniformity of different financial performance indicators of GIC Re has been examined using Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance (W). To assess the internal growth capacity of GIC Re internal growth rate has been used, and the likelihood of GIC Re going into financial distress is analysed using multivariate discriminant approach, namely, modified Altman’s Z-score model and logit analysis technique, namely, Ohlson’s O-score model.

The results exhibit that financial performance of GIC Re is somewhat satisfactory over a few considerable areas. However, no notable degree of uniformity has been observed amongst the varied financial performance indicators, namely, performance ratio, expense ratio, return on assets, risk retention ratio and combined ratio of GIC Re. The results also reveal GIC Re is lacking ability of growing internally. Moreover, there remains a significant possibility of GIC Re going into financial distress in the near future and so.

This study is one of the first empirical research studies in India that examines the financial performance of GIC Re from different perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of industry loss warranties (ILWs), an alternative risk transfer instrument which has become increasingly popular throughout the last few years.

The authors first point out key characteristics of ILWs important to investor and cedent, including transaction costs, moral hazard, basis risk, counterparty risk, industry loss index, and regulation. Next, the authors present and discuss the adequacy of actuarial and financial approaches for pricing ILWs, as well as the aspects of basis risk. Finally, drivers of demand and associated models frameworks from the purchaser's viewpoint are studied.

Financial pricing approaches for ILWs are highly sensitive to input parameters, which is important given the high volatility of the underlying loss index. In addition, the underlying assumption of replicability of the claims is not without problems. Due to their simple and standardized structure and the dependence on a transparent industry loss index, ILWs are low‐barrier products, which can also be offered by hedge funds. In principle, traditional reinsurance contracts are still preferred as a measure of risk transfer, especially since these are widely accepted for solvency capital reduction. However, the main important impact factor for the demand of ILWs from the perspective of market participants, i.e. large diversified reinsurers and hedge funds, is the lower price due to rather low transaction costs and less documentation effort. Hence, ILWs are attractive despite the introduction of basis risk and the still somewhat opaque regulatory environment.

An important issue for future research is how reinsureds deal with the basis risk inherent in ILWs. Another central point is the development of a European industry loss index and the creation of an exchange platform to enable an even higher degree of standardization and a faster processing of transactions.

ILWs feature an industry loss index to be triggered, and, in some cases, a double‐trigger design that includes a company indemnity trigger. ILW contracts belong to the class of alternative risk transfer instruments that have become increasingly popular, especially in the retrocession reinsurance market. There has been no comprehensive analysis of these instruments in academic literature to date. Consequently, the authors believe that this paper provides a high degree of originality.