Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/pennin/99-26.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Cat Bond Premium Puzzle?

Author

Listed:
  • Vivek J. Bantwal
  • Howard C. Kunreuther
Abstract
Catastrophe Bonds whose payoffs are tied to the occurrence of natural disasters offer insurers the ability to hedge event risk through the capital markets that could otherwise leave them insolvent if concentrated solely on their own balance sheets. At the same time, they offer investors a unique opportunity to enhance their portfolios with an asset that provides an attractive return that is uncorrelated with typical financial securities Despite its attractiveness, spreads in this market remain considerably higher than the spreads for comparable speculative grade debt. This paper uses results from behavior economics to suggest why cat bonds have not been more attractive to the investment community at current prices. In particular, the authors suggest that "ambiguity aversion", "loss aversion", and "uncertainty avoidance" may account for the reluctance of investment managers to invest in these products. In addition, since Catastrophe Bonds are a new type of investment, investors must invest time and money up front in order to educate themselves about the legal and technical complexities of the Cat Bond market before that investor can make a "to-buy or not-to-buy" decision. Such a transaction cost may reduce the attractiveness of the new bonds to the point where the investor would prefer to stay out of the market. The bulk of the paper consists of quantitative assessments of each of these hypotheses, along with a demonstration that Cat Bonds are indeed much more attractive than high yield bonds in terms of their Sharpe ratios (the ratio of the "excess return" over the risk free rate to the standard deviation of returns on the bonds). This is accomplished by simulating potential losses for hypothetical Cat Bonds under a wide variety of hurricane scenarios for the Miami/Dade county are. These findings lead the authors to suggest that issuers of Cat Bonds could themselves take steps to lower the cost of placing risk in this manner. Specifically, issuers might standardize a simple structure of terms to decrease the investor's cost of education. In addition issuers could better quantify and reduce pricing uncertainty. These steps will should increase demand for these instruments and produce a concomitant reduction in price.

Suggested Citation

  • Vivek J. Bantwal & Howard C. Kunreuther, 1999. "A Cat Bond Premium Puzzle?," Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers 99-26, Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania.
    • Handle: RePEc:wop:pennin:99-26
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://fic.wharton.upenn.edu/fic/papers/99/9926.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mathieu Gatumel & Dominique Guegan, 2008. "Towards an understanding approach of the insurance linked securities market," Post-Print halshs-00235354, HAL.
    2. Samuel H. Cox & Yijia Lin & Shaun Wang, 2006. "Multivariate Exponential Tilting and Pricing Implications for Mortality Securitization," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 73(4), pages 719-736, December.
    3. Lin, Yijia & Cox, Samuel H., 2008. "Securitization of catastrophe mortality risks," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 628-637, April.
    4. Jarrow, Robert A., 2010. "A simple robust model for Cat bond valuation," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 72-79, June.
    5. Cummins, J. David & Lalonde, David & Phillips, Richard D., 2004. "The basis risk of catastrophic-loss index securities," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(1), pages 77-111, January.
    6. Wen-Chang Lin & Yi-Hsun Lai, 2012. "Evaluating catastrophe reinsurance contracts: an option pricing approach with extreme risk," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(12), pages 1017-1028, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:pennin:99-26. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fiupaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.