RiskProf

At War with the Weather

 

	Four years in the making…. I just received my copy in the mail today from MIT Press.  It is available on Amazon for $ 37.12.  What a bargain. In the fine print on the cover you can see while I am not a primary author I do get the “with” treatment.   Other notables are Neil Doherty, bob Klein and Mark Pauly.
What is nice about the Amazon listing is that there are a ton of blurbs. However, there is no Kindle edition yet.  Nor are there any free peeks. You’ll just have to wait.

A Little Friday Levity

Not to be confused with the new little Leverty.  Riskprof’s Ty Leverty had a little boy earlier this spring.  I won’t disclose his name out of respect to his privacy, but it is a real strong Irish name.  I am particularly fond of Finbarr as a name, but my wife (who was probably thinking of the then wee one’s future) repulsed with significant gusto my attempts to name any of my little sigmas Finbarr.  Just so you know -- I did stop moping about this years ago.

Here is the real Friday levity.  Evidently, someone sued Pepsi (the owners of Cap’n Crunch) for false advertising for $5 billion because there were no crunchberries in the cereal.  I realize $5 billion is much anymore, but I think the fact that the word “crunchberry” is not in a real dictionary or even MS Word’s might have been a clue.

boingboing has a short story, but the comments are hilarious.. some of my favorites so far..

• #7. I heard that Crunch [had] to stop using his formal title when it was exposed that he never actually served in the military.
• #3. What!? Next thing you'll be telling me is that Froot Loops aren't made from real fruit, and that there's no nuts in Grape Nuts!
• #37. Don't be silly. Froot Loops are made from froot.
• #9. I love that she's suing on behalf of, not just herself, but the "other people" who have been similarly misled. […]Don't kid yourself, lady, you are an island in this belief system.
• #33 Follow up suit: Lucky Charms are not "magically delicious." They are merely "delicious."
• #48. So... that bowl I just had of Rice Chex didn't really have any Czecks (sic) in it, right?

New book

Last week I had the privilege of testifying before Congress on the future of insurance regulation (more on that later).  Today, I received a copy of a book edited by Bob Klein and me with the same title.

It does not appear to be on Amazon -- which just seems strange to me.  It is also missing from the front page of Brookings Press, but  you can order a copy here.  I am not impressed with their website as there is missing information on the book site. 

Remember Us?

We've had a busy year here at RiskProf.  Things are settling down and posting will resume next week.  it is hard to believe that we've missed all the excitement with AIG, financial services regulation, and liability reform.  However, as the time consuming projects are winding down I find that I will have time to resume regular posts. I'd also like to welcome a new member of RiskProf, Professor Elizabeth Brown.  Prof. Brown recently joined our faculty from the St. Thomas University Law School. While she is a lawyer (a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, she also worked as a professional economist for a number of years. She will fit in nicely with our group of economists and economist/lawyers. Her research is on financial services regulation and she will be a welcome addition to our department and Riskprof.

School is Starting up Soon

Riskprof will be posting more regularly now that school is supposed to start.  Lars, Ty and I were out in Portland, OR for the American Risk and Insurance Association's Annual Meeting.  Papers can be found here.

Here are a few I thought were interesting.  There were probably others but I did not get to see them.

An Economic Analysis of Single versus Multiple Jurisdictional Regulation –
The Case of Risk Retention Groups
J. Tyler Leverty
July 28, 2008

ABSTRACT
Insurers are regulated by states. However, a small subset of firms, risk retention
groups (RRGs), are subject to single entity regulation. This paper attempts to
determine the effect of duplicative regulation by isolating those firms that have the
opportunity to choose between single- or multiple-jurisdictional regulation. The
results reveal that there is significant increased regulatory compliance costs
associated with multi-state regulation and these costs influence firms’
organizational structure decisions. In addition, regression estimates suggest that a
move to a single-jurisdictional regulatory framework would result in a 24 percent
reduction in total expenses for the average firm. Moreover, results show that the
higher compliance costs associated with multi-jurisdictional regulation leads to a
higher per unit costs of insurance. Overall, there are significant benefits associated
with moving away to a single entity regulatory framework.

About RiskProf

RiskProf has just hit 100K page views since May 04 or so, so I thought I'd do a little rearranging of the web log itself.

When I figure out how to set up an easy to edit and maintain the blogroll I will do so.

Thanks for all the views.