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Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
Leukhina, Oksana; Bloedel, Alex; Krishna, R. Vijay (2024-08-11)
We study the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. A principal insures an agent whose private type follows an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, it also backloads high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his reports increases without bound. These results extend—and help elucidate the limits of—the hallmark ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-020

Newsletter
The Growth and Challenges of Cyber Insurance
Polacek, Andy; Granato, Andrew (2019)
Cyberattacks have grown in frequency and cost over the past decade, with high-profile cases, such as the 2013 Target data breach, the 2017 Equifax data breach, and the leak of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election making national headlines. Ransomware attacks, intellectual property theft, and fraud cost companies billions in recovery expenses, fines, and lost revenues every year. More firms are purchasing cyber insurance as a way to cover losses and expenses resulting from cyber incidents.
Chicago Fed Letter

Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
Leukhina, Oksana; Bloedel, Alex; Krishna, R. Vijay (2021-12-12)
This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-020

Discussion Paper
Flood Risk and Flood Insurance
Blickle, Kristian S.; Perry, Evan; Santos, João A. C. (2025-08-07)
Recent natural disasters have renewed concerns about insurance markets for natural disaster relief. In January 2025, wildfires wreaked havoc in residential areas outside of Los Angeles. Direct damage estimates for the Los Angeles wildfires range from $76 billion to $131 billion, with only up to $45 billion of insured losses (Li and Yu, 2025). In this post, we examine the state of another disaster insurance market: the flood insurance market. We review features of flood insurance mandates, flood insurance take-up, and connect this to work in a related Staff Report that explores how mortgage ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20250807

A Closer Look at the Correlation Between Google Trends and Initial Unemployment Insurance Claims
Fogarty, Michael; Butters, R. Andrew; Brave, Scott A. (2020-06-17)
Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been growing interest in tracking labor market activity with “big data” sources like Google Trends.1 Just as an example, one can track how the number of Google searches with the term unemployment office has changed over the past week for the Chicago metro area or explore how unemployment became one of the top searched issues across the U.S. during the early months of the pandemic here.
Chicago Fed Insights

Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in Covid-19: Health Insurance, Comorbidities, and Medical Facilities
Avtar, Ruchi; Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2021-01-12)
Our previous work documents that low-income and majority-minority areas were considerably more affected by COVID-19, as captured by markedly higher case and death rates. In a four-part series starting with this post, we seek to understand the reasons behind these income and racial disparities. Do disparities in health status translate into disparities in COVID-19 intensity? Does the health system play a role through health insurance and hospital capacity? Can disparities in COVID-19 intensity be explained by high-density, crowded environments? Does social distancing, pollution, or the age ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20210112a

Working Paper
Last Resort Insurance: Wildfires and the Regulation of a Crashing Market
Taylor, Reid; Turland, Madeline; Weill, Joakim A. (2025-03-26)
An increasing number of people are denied home insurance coverage in the private market and must instead turn to state-sponsored plans known as “Insurers of Last Resort.” This paper examines how insurers of last resort interact with the private market under increasing disaster risks. We first present a simple model of an adversely selected insurance market, highlighting that the insurer of last resort allows strict price regulation to be compatible with full insurance. We then empirically study the California non-renewal moratoriums, a regulation that forced insurers to supply insurance ...
Working Papers , Paper 2510

Report
Unintended Consequences of "Mandatory" Flood Insurance
Blickle, Kristian S.; Santos, João A. C. (2022-04-01)
We document that the quasi-mandatory U.S. flood insurance program reduces mortgage lending along both the extensive and intensive margins. We measure flood insurance mandates using FEMA flood maps, focusing on the discreet updates to these maps that can be made exogenous to true underlying flood risk. Reductions in lending are most pronounced for low-income and low-FICO borrowers, implying that the effects are at least partially driven by the added financial burden of insurance. Our results are also stronger among non-local or more-distant banks, who have a diminished ability to monitor local ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1012

Journal Article
Nontraditional Insurance and Risks to Financial Stability
Leitner, Yaron (2018-01)
Do insurance companies pose a threat to financial stability? Historically, the answer has been no. But the insurance industry?s expansion into nontraditional activities has prompted reconsideration.
Economic Insights , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Pages 18-25

Working Paper
Capital Constraints and Risk Shifting: An Instrumental Approach
Drexler, Alejandro; King, Thomas B. (2021-09-02)
When firms approach distress, whether they engage in asset substitution (risk shifting) or rebuild equity (risk management) may depend on their access to capital markets. The property-casualty insurance industry has two features that make it ideal for testing this hypothesis: (1) the main losses for insurers are exogenous events like hurricanes that provide a strong instrument for financial distress; and (2) many insurers are organized as mutual companies, which cannot issue stock. Consistent with the importance of capital constraints, stock companies issue new equity following a negative ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2021-13

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