The NAIC provided grants to research teams from the University of Pennsylavania, the University of South Carolina and Stewart Economics for a study of the causes and policy implications of the cycles and crises in property/casualty insurance. The results of this research are compiled here with additional explanation by the editors.

The Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance presents new research and findings on key aspects of the economics of the property-casualty insurance industry. The volume explores the industrial organization, regulation, financing, and taxation of this business. The first paper, on external financing and insurance cycles, contains a wealth of information on trends and patterns in the industry's financial structure. The last essay, which compares performance of stock and mutual insurance companies, takes a fresh look at the way a company's organizational structure affects its responses to different economic situations. Two papers focus on rate regulation in the auto insurance industry, and provide broad overviews of the structure and economics of the insurance industry as a whole. Also addressed are the system of regulating insurance companies in the United States, who insures the insurers, and the effects of tax law changes in the 1980s on the prices of insurance policies.

This study performs a time series analysis to explore the effects of property casualty insurance underwriting cycles on stock and mutual insurers' asset risk taking. It is well documented that underwriting costs and insolvency risks faced by insurers are greater in hard markets while lower in soft markets. To achieve optimal risk portfolios, insurers may take on more asset risks in soft markets and discharge them in hard markets. Moreover, we expect stock companies would be more reactive to underwriting cycles than are mutual companies given greater risk-taking capacity and better managerial-incentive-control mechanism of the stock companies. Our result confirms these conjectures. While stock companies are found actively responding to the underwriting cycle, mutual companies appear to be indolent. Another interesting finding is that property casualty insurers, both mutual and stock companies, do not actively respond to capital market signals.

This paper explores insurance as a source of financial system vulnerability. It provides a brief overview of the insurance industry and reviews the risks it faces, as well as several recent failures of insurance companies that had systemic implications. Assimilation of banking-type activities by life insurers appears to be the key systemic vulnerability. Building on this experience and the experience gained under the FSAP, the paper proposes key indicators that should be compiled and used for surveillance of financial soundness of insurance companies and the insurance sector as a whole.