Document Type
Thesis or dissertation
Date of this Version
May 2008
Abstract
The management of catastrophic risk comprises a growing social, political, and economic challenge of our time. Recent natural disasters have dramatized the need for supplemental insurance avenues, including long term insurance and multiyear cat bonds, which hedge against long term liability exposure. An empirical examination of cat bond issuance volume over the past decade reveals that long term, multiyear cat bonds with tenors of more than 3 years pale in liquidity versus short term cat bonds. The paper helps to explain this asymmetry by building an integrated behavioral finance model for economic decision making in catastrophic contexts and by using results from the investor psychology literature.
Keywords
catastrophic risk, insurance, capital markets, cat bonds, long term insurance, behavioral finance, investor psychology
Date Posted: 08 October 2008
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons@Penn.