Modern Insurance Developments


Book Description










Underwriters of the United States


Book Description

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.




Morals and Markets


Book Description

Life insurance—the promise of an insurer to pay a sum upon a person's death in exchange for a regular premium—is a bizarre enterprise. How can we monetize human life? Should we? What statistics do we use, what assumptions do we make, and what behavioral factors do we consider? First published in 1979, Morals and Markets Is a pathbreaking study exploring the development of life insurance in the United States. Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer combines economic history and a sociological perspective to advance a novel interpretation of the life insurance industry. The book pioneered a cultural approach to the analysis of morally controversial markets. Zelizer begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the life insurance industry, a contentious chapter in the history of American business. Life insurance was stigmatized at first, denounced in newspapers and condemned by religious leaders as an immoral and sacrilegious gamble on human life. Over time, the business became a widely praised arrangement to secure a family's future. How did life insurance overcome cultural barriers? As Zelizer shows, the evolution of the industry in the United States matched evolving attitudes toward death, money, family relations, property, and personal legacy.




Modern Captive Insurance


Book Description

Insurance is a sophisticated financial vehicle that can be best understood through the lens of risk management. Experiencing dramatic growth, captive insurance is owned and controlled by its insureds, pooling the risks of its owners. Captive insurance provides businesses with unmatched flexibility regarding coverage, claims, premium, and control, while also offering advantages such as lucrative dividends and innovative financing techniques. This state-of-the-art guide traces the development of small captive insurance and addresses how to set up and properly manage a captive. Modern Captive Insurance: A Legal Guide to Formation, Operation, and Exit Strategies, begins with an overview of what captive insurance is and detail the advantages in setting up a captive for a range of different business situations. Chapters explain how to incorporate and start up a new captive insurance program, including basic terminology and the roles different professionals play in running captive programs. Captive insurance is an intricate yet effective risk management strategy. For guidance in properly establishing a captive, the authors address critical issues evaluated by the IRS, such as risk shifting and distribution, and explore ethical considerations arising out of off-shore captive management, such as how to identify money laundering red flags and how to properly manage the investments of reserves. Modern Captive Insurance takes an in-depth look at the topics and issues that are common in insurance and in businesses, but are often handled differently for captives, such as: Financial statements, investments, and financial ratings Policy drafting and coverage Risk pools and structuring the pooling arrangement to be valid Federal, state and local taxation Tax-exempt organizations Risk retention groups (RRP) Reinsurance, and more Table of Contents Chapter 1: Captive Company Formation Chapter 2: Captives and Capitalists Chapter 3: Risk Pools Chapter 4: Financial Statements, Investments, and Financial Ratings Chapter 5: Policy Drafting and Coverage Chapter 6: Underwriting and Claims Reserving Chapter 7: Federal Income Tax and Captives Chapter 8: State and Local Captive Insurance Issues Chapter 9: Tax-Exempt Organizations and Captive Insurance Chapter 10: Risk Retention Groups and How They Work Chapter 11: Reinsurance Chapter 12: Workers' Compensation and the Grand Bargain Chapter 13: Employee Benefits Conclusion Table of Cases and Index







Insurance Era


Book Description

Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life. Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life. Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.