This article asserts that the market for property insurance, particularly homeowners insurance, in the State of Florida is experiencing failures, and that a combination of market problems, externalities, and interventions unique to Florida led to these failures. The authors provide evidence of market failures in the form of undesirable market outcomes, both over time and in comparison to other coastal states. Also, they provide a narrative description of the market events, problems, and policies preceding these adverse market developments and link the narrative to the evidence. Recommendations for a return to risk‐based pricing and incentives for appropriate property mitigation are made.
To increase residential property insurance options for wind‐related disaster events, the State of Florida created the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation (Citizens) and the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. These entities play a major role in financing disaster losses for Florida. In this policy article, the authors assert that the State of Florida has emphasized the political objective of insurance affordability rather than managing and controlling risk for the benefit of the citizens of the state. The burden for financing catastrophic hurricane losses has been transferred to the public as most property and casualty insurance policies in Florida are assessable. Florida plays an inherent leadership role in the disaster risk arena, given its high exposure as well as its deep insurance penetration. The authors assert that while Florida has taken a leadership role in disaster risk control, the state's disaster risk financing strategy has failed to employ a long‐term focus that recognizes the interconnectedness of all parts of the system. The opportunity for the state going forward is to change its public policy focus to one that emphasizes availability over affordability. Florida's private markets could operate more competitively, and thus not unnecessarily place Florida's citizens and their economy at risk.
We examine whether the risk characterization estimated by catastrophic loss projection models is sensitive to the revelation of new information regarding risk type. We use commercial loss projection models from two widely employed modeling firms to estimate the expected hurricane losses of Florida Atlantic University's building stock, both including and excluding secondary information regarding hurricane mitigation features that influence damage vulnerability. We then compare the results of the models without and with this revealed information and find that the revelation of additional, secondary information influences modeled losses for the windstorm-exposed university building stock, primarily evidenced by meaningful percent differences in the loss exceedance output indicated after secondary modifiers are incorporated in the analysis. Secondary risk characteristics for the data set studied appear to have substantially greater impact on probable maximum loss estimates than on average annual loss estimates. While it may be intuitively expected for catastrophe models to indicate that secondary risk characteristics hold value for reducing modeled losses, the finding that the primary value of secondary risk characteristics is in reduction of losses in the "tail" (low probability, high severity) events is less intuitive, and therefore especially interesting. Further, we address the benefit-cost tradeoffs that commercial entities must consider when deciding whether to undergo the data collection necessary to include secondary information in modeling. Although we assert the long-term benefit-cost tradeoff is positive for virtually every entity, we acknowledge short-term disincentives to such an effort.
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