On-site visits to financial service firms were conducted to review and evaluate their risk management systems. In the insurance sector, this evaluation covered prominent life/health and property-liability insurers, both in the United States and abroad. The information obtained covered both the philosophy and the practice of financial risk management. This article outines the results of this investigation. It reports the state of risk management techniques in the industry. It reports the standard of practice and evaluates how and why it is conducted in the particular way chosen. In addition, critiques are offered where appropriate. We discuss the problems which the industry finds most difficult to address, shortcomings of the current methodology used to analyze risk, and the elements that are missing in the current procedures of risk managment.The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number of insolvent insurers. The ostensible causes of these insolvencies were myriad. Some of the insolvencies were precipitated by rapidly rising or declining interest rates. Others resulted from losses on assets such as junk bonds, commercial mortgages, collateralized mortgage obligations, real estate, and derivatives.Mispricing of insurance policies, natural catastrophes, and changes in legal interpretations of liability and the limits of coverage hurt still others. The "churning" of policies by unscrupulous sales agents, insolvencies among the reinsurers backing the policies issued, noncompliance with insurance regulation, and malfeasance on the part of officers and directors of the insurance companies affected some as well. But despite the numerous and disparate apparent causes of these insolvencies, the underlying factor in all of them was the same: inadequate risk management practices. In response to this, insurers almost universally have embarked upon an upgrading of their financial risk

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While adverse selection problems between insureds and insurers are well known to insurance researchers, few explore adverse selection in the insurance industry from a capital markets perspective. This study examines adverse selection in the quoted prices of insurers' common stocks with a particular focus on the opacity of both asset portfolios and underwriting liabilities. We find that more opaque underwriting lines result in greater adverse selection costs for property-casualty (P-C) insurers. A similar effect is not apparent for life-health (L-H) insurers and we find no effect of asset opaqueness on adverse selection for either L-H or P-C insurers.

Increasing costs of long-term care are placing ever greater burdens on state and federal budgets, yet private long-term care insurance remains a relatively minor financing vehicle. Although many researchers provide rationales for the limited private market, some life-health insurers have forged ahead into this relatively new and risky line of business. We investigate what makes these insurers different and whether managers are following a diversification or strategic focus strategy. We find that strategic focus is a consistently important factor and that managers' participation and volume decisions are made independently. Copyright (c) The Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2009.

Equilibrium models of dynamic insurance markets can be bifurcated according to underlying assumptions about whether or not insurers commit to long-term contracts. The difference is substantial in that commitment models imply price highballing over time while no-commitment models indicate price lowballing. Extant empirical studies provide mixed evidence, however. We use long-term care (LTC) insurance data, which allow us both to better control for heterogeneous, observable risk, to examine dynamic profitability and pricing in a relatively young, innovative insurance market. Our tests generally indicate temporal price lowballing, thereby providing support for the no-commitment models. Copyright The Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2004.