IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/gpprii/v40y2015i2p232-255.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Underwriting Apophenia and Cryptids: Are Cycles Statistical Figments of our Imagination?

Author

Listed:
  • M Martin Boyer

    (Département de la Finance, HEC Montréal (Université de Montréal). 3000, chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal, QC, Canada H3T 2A7)

  • Iqbal Owadally

    (Cass Business School, City University London, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, U.K.)

Abstract

This paper re-examines the evidence in favour of the existence of underwriting cycles in property and casualty insurance and their economical significance. Using a meta-analysis of published papers in the area of insurance economics, we show that the evidence supporting the existence of underwriting cycles is misleading. There is, in fact, little evidence in favour of insurance cycles with a linear autoregressive character. This means that any cyclicality in firm profitability in the property and casualty insurance industry is not predictable in a classical econometric framework. It follows that pricing in the property and casualty insurance industry is not incompatible with that of a competitive market.

Suggested Citation

  • M Martin Boyer & Iqbal Owadally, 2015. "Underwriting Apophenia and Cryptids: Are Cycles Statistical Figments of our Imagination?," The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan;The Geneva Association, vol. 40(2), pages 232-255, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:gpprii:v:40:y:2015:i:2:p:232-255
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/gpp/journal/v40/n2/pdf/gpp201412a.pdf
    File Function: Link to full text PDF
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/gpp/journal/v40/n2/full/gpp201412a.html
    File Function: Link to full text HTML
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Iqbal Owadally & Feng Zhou & Douglas Wright, 2018. "The Insurance Industry as a Complex Social System: Competition, Cycles and Crises," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 21(4), pages 1-2.
    2. Annette Hofmann & Cristina Sattarhoff, 2023. "Underwriting Cycles in Property-Casualty Insurance: The Impact of Catastrophic Events," Risks, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-25, April.

    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:pal:gpprii:v:40:y:2015:i:2:p:232-255. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ .

    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.