Band 17, Heft 2 - Special Issue: History of Insurance in a Global Perspective & 2022 APRIA Best Paper Award

In contrast to previous work, this paper studies the product-dependent risk sensitivities of policyholders toward the reported safety levels of a life insurer in a long-term multi-period setting. With this aim, we first conduct two choice-based conjoint analyses using a German survey panel to investigate the effect of an insurer’s reported default probability on individuals’ willingness to pay for annuities and term life insurances. Our experimental results suggest that individuals (sharply) reduce their willingness to pay for probabilistic life insurance products, with (strong) product-specific differences. In light of these observations, the paper then revisits the impact of these differing risk sensitivities on a life insurer’s risk situation in a simulation study based on an asset-liability model with a specific focus on a life insurer offering annuities and term life insurances. The results reveal the potentially strong impact of such product-dependent risk sensitivities on risk-reducing portfolio compositions. One main driver is the deviation between risk sensitivities depending on the respective product (annuities vs. term life).

This paper discusses the macroeconomic and environmental conditions for the spread of insurance in three non-Western world regions (China, Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa). Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it examines the patterns of economic development relevant for the growth of insurance in these regions, and compares these against standard economic models of insurance diffusion. The paper argues that the growth of insurance must be explained by more than a simple linear relationship with the growth of per capita incomes. As well as income levels, other factors affecting insurance development include urbanization, taxation, savings rates, legal compulsion to insure, state provision of social security, state-owned insurance bodies and the presence of large infrastructural projects. The second part of the paper focuses on environmental conditions in these regions that drove insurance growth, including climate and geography, demography, drought and disease, building materials and risk-reduction technologies.

This paper investigates the main features of the Genoese insurance market between 1564 and 1572, thanks to the analysis of an unpublished tax register that preserves all insurance policies drafted in Genoa in that period. Marine insurance, intended as an archetypical risk-shifting technique, is probably the oldest financial instrument intended solely to protect against the economic consequences of commercial losses. Conventional premium insurance was developed as a tool to transfer risk during the commercial revolution of the late middle ages. This development was first led by Italian cities, among whom Genoa played a key role. However, Genoese operators involved in the insurance sectors, which belonged almost exclusively to the patrician families ruling the republic, acted as a mutual “risk-community” in a semi-closed market: a sort of “syndicate”. They shared among them the risks of maritime routes calling at the port of Genoa. Insurance was a zero-sum game, with low losses and gains that did not allow a true single-sector specialisation.

Global disruption positions risk mitigation at the centre of survival strategies. Social risk mitigation strategies display relationships of trust, responsibility and culture. Insurance in global markets expands as bi-polarism began to contract from the early 1990s, but the massive external shocks of the pandemic and the rising interest environment impact negatively on this advance. What is likely the nature of risk mitigation responses in the post-pandemic era? How have societies, especially in developing regions such as some African societies, responded to the growing risk and existential threats? This paper explores African risk mitigation strategies in the past and the potential for future alignment of global insurance products to the demands of 21st Century African markets.

This paper surveys insurance policies and proposals by companies that operated in the decades around 1800 in different regions of the North American continent. Our survey serves to compose a landscape of environmental risks that early insurers registered. This line of inquiry merits special attention for records of the Phoenix Assurance Company London, which include a unique documentation of natural hazards shaped by the risk inspection tour of the British insurance expert Jenkin Jones. We attempt to offer a long-term view on those natural catastrophes and disaster-prone regions that hold a prominent place in American memory since the late nineteenth century.