| Popis: |
We investigate how insurance affects agents’ decisions when being faced by endogenous, climate-driven extreme events. This is not only important in order to understand how the possibility of insurance augments mitigation and saving decisions, but it also improves our understanding of how insurance should be provided. Since there are no studies as of now that rely on such an integrated approach, we extend the literature along two lines. Firstly, we develop a neoclassical growth framework with endogenous extreme events and an insurance sector. Secondly, we introduce a simulation method that allows us to explicitly take these extreme events into account and which yields additional numerical insights. In doing so we can fully characterize and quantify the impact of different insurance policies for mitigation and economic growth decisions. Our analytical results and computational experiments show that (i) transparency of the insurance sector is the decisive requisite for abatement activities, implying substantial policy opportunities; (ii) a decentralized economy will under-invest in abatement without adequate policy interventions; (iii) precautionary beliefs on the frequency of extreme events lead to more sustainability; (iv) a social security system which prices insurance fairly is preferable to an insurance industry which provides insurance with an overhead. |
Full Text from ScienceDirect