The insurance sector, notably the monoline insurers and A.I.G., played a crucial role during the boom of 2004-2007 by guaranteeing a variety of credit risks using both insurance policies and significantly substitutable credit derivatives. These guarantees yielded huge losses and liquidity requirements for these insurers when the guaranteed assets declined in value. The large losses recorded by ...

Tobit regression is used to analyze market shares for a cross section of 273 insurers operating in 1990. Lines of business analyzed include personal auto liability and physical damage insurance, homeowners multiperil, commercial general liability, workers compensation, and commercial multiperil. After controlling for size and other factors, evidence indicates that direct writing insurers have c...

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secure demand without contracting with all insurers (e.g., those most attractive to consumers and those that are capacity constrained) may demand high...

The Affordable Care Act's regulation of medical loss ratios requires health insurers to use at least 80-85 percent of the premiums they collect for direct medical expenses (care delivery) or for efforts to improve the quality of care. To gauge this rule's effect on insurers' financial performance, we measured changes between 2010 and 2011 in key financial ratios reflecting insurers' operating p...

In 1996, free choice of health insurers was introduced to the German social health insurance system. One objective was to increase efficiency through competition. A crucial precondition for effective competition among health insurers is that consumers search for lower-priced health insurers. We test this hypothesis by estimating the price elasticities of insurers' market shares. We use unique p...

This paper explores the efficiency of European specialist and composite insurers transacting long-term insurance business. Value measures of insurance company inputs and outputs are utilised to undertake an exploration of the technical efficiency of European insurers. This is achieved by benchmarking the relative performance of insurers licensed to transact long-term business in fifteen Europea...