Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 14th May 2024, 10:59:04am EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Track T4-5: Climate Finance: Risk and Regulation
Time:
Tuesday, 21/May/2024:
1:45pm - 2:30pm

Session Chair: Matthew Gustafson, Pennsylvania State University
Discussant: Ivan Ivanov, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Location: Room 1203


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Presentations

When Insurers Exit: Climate Losses, Fragile Insurers, and Mortgage Markets

Parinitha {Pari} Sastry1, Ishita Sen2, Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva3

1Columbia Business School; 2Harvard Business School; 3Federal Reserve Board

This paper studies how homeowners insurance markets respond to growing climate losses and how this impacts mortgage market dynamics. Using Florida as a case study, we show that traditional insurers are exiting high risk areas, and new lower quality insurers are entering and filling the gap. These new insurers service the riskiest areas, are less diversified, hold less capital, and 20 percent of them become insolvent. We trace their growth to a lax insurance regulatory environment. Yet, despite their low quality, these insurers secure high financial stability ratings, not from traditional rating agencies, but from emerging rating agencies. Importantly, these ratings are high enough to meet the minimum rating requirements set by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). We find that these new insurers would not meet GSE eligibility thresholds if subjected to traditional rating agencies’ methodologies. We then examine the implications of these dynamics for mortgage markets. We show that lenders respond to the decline in insurance quality by selling a large portion of exposed loans to the GSEs. We quantify the counterparty risk by examining the surge in serious delinquencies and foreclosure around the landfall of Hurricane Irma. Our results show that the GSEs bear a large share of insurance counterparty risk, which is driven by their mis-calibrated insurer eligibility requirements and lax insurance regulation.


Sastry-When Insurers Exit-1281.pdf


 
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