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Home / Events / APEBC Webinar: Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance

Jun 08 2023

APEBC Webinar: Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance

This paper quantifies frictions in uptake, tests for adverse selection, and analyzes welfare effects of proposed reforms in natural disaster insurance markets. I find that willingness to pay is remarkably low. In high-risk flood zones, fewer than 60% of homeowners purchase flood insurance even though premia are only two-thirds of own costs. Estimating flood insurance demand and cost elasticities using house-level variation in premia from recent U.S. Congressional reforms reveals that these homeowners select into insurance based on observable differences in adaptation, but not private information about risk. These findings change the sign of predicted welfare effects of proposed policies.

kwagner_square Katherine Wagner Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia

Katherine Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia, where she focuses her research primarily on Environmental and Energy Economics and Public Finance. She uses a range of empirical tools to study questions related to environmental externalities, climate change, and natural resources. She is also a Research Affiliate of the CESifo Network.

Before joining UBC, Katherine was an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She completed her PhD in Economics at Yale University, and also holds an MA in Economics from the University of British Columbia and a BA in Economics and Accounting from McGill University.

Event Details

Virtual - : 10 am Pacific Standard Time / 1 pm Eastern Standard Time, followed by APEBC’s Annual General Meeting from 11:00 am to 11:30 am PST (for APEBC Members only).
Jun 08, 2023 13:00 - 14:00 EST

Event Registration

Public Attendee List

  • Andrew Yim
  • Andrea Sullivan
  • David Williams
  • Charles DeLand
  • Fanny Siauw-Soegiarto
  • Steve Dorey
  • Atousa Mirzaei-Rezaei
  • Bradley Krause
  • Stephen Spence
  • Ryan Biln
  • Andaleeb Qayyum
  • Crystal Arnburg
  • Davis Dolan
  • Aaron Millette
  • Pershing Sun
  • Andrew Yim
  • Chrystelle Saizonou
  • Matthew Sebastiani
  • Charles DeLand
  • Annie Zhai
  • Michael Barkusky
  • Benjamin Denis Rommelaere
  • Mark Szekely
  • Phaedra Sydor
  • Calista Cheung
  • Andrew Yim
  • Jacob Loree
  • Beverly Tennant
  • J. MacGregor Taylor
  • Tyler Horton
  • Lina Alkhani
  • Jingliang Xiao
  • Natasha Apollonova
  • Alejandra Villarroel
  • Adil Mughal