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: 9th May 2025, 10:12:03am EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Track W6-6: Real Estate
Time:
Wednesday, 21/May/2025:
2:45pm - 3:30pm

Session Chair: Timothy McQuade, Haas School of Business
Discussant: Parinitha Sastry, Columbia Business School
Location: Babbio Center 104


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Presentations

Coverage Neglect in Homeowners Insurance

Tony Cookson1, Emily Gallagher1, Philip Mulder2

1University of Colorado Boulder; 2University of Wisconsin - Madison

Most homeowners do not have enough insurance coverage to rebuild their house after a total loss. Using contract-level data from 24 homeowners insurance companies in Colorado, we show wide differences in average underinsurance across insurers that persist conditional on policyholder characteristics. Underinsurance matters for disaster recovery. Across households that lost homes to a major wildfire, each 10 p.p. increase in underinsurance reduces the likelihood of filing a rebuilding permit within a year by 4 p.p.. To understand why consumers purchase underinsured policies, we build a discrete choice insurance demand model. The results suggest that policyholders treat insurers that write less coverage as if they set lower premiums, forgoing options to get more coverage at the same premium from other insurers -- a pattern we call coverage neglect. Our findings suggest that coverage limits are either not salient to consumers or they are difficult to estimate without the input of insurance agents. Under a counterfactual without coverage neglect, consumer surplus increases by $290 per year, or 10% of annual premiums, on average.

Cookson-Coverage Neglect in Homeowners Insurance-1063.pdf


 
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