January 20, 2022, 4 -5 p.m. ET
Hannah Farber, Columbia University
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. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. Prof. Farber’s new book Underwriters of the United States reveals insurers as nation builders and market makers.
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January 27, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Kenneth Abraham, University of Virginia School of Law
Daniel Schwarcz, University of Minnesota Law School
Insurance law scholars have long believed that insurance does more than just transfer risk: it plays a key role in regulating the conduct of policyholders by creating incentives for risk management and in some cases requiring or forbidding certain behavior. Some have claimed that the power of insurance can be a potent substitute for direct regulation by government. Professors Abraham and Schwarcz argue that the ability of insurance to substitute for governmental regulation is more limited than we have realized.
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February 3, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Justin Sydnor, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business
Empirical evidence shows that for many employers who offer different levels of health insurance coverage (e.g., a high-deductible option alongside a more generous plan), one of the options ends up dominating the other, meaning that one plan is simply worse than the other for all consumers. This seems to occur because employers pass through cost differentials between the employees who opt into low vs. high coverage (typically younger/healthier vs. older/less healthy). Offering different coverage options (without any constraints on how those options are priced to the employees) creates a back-door that permits differential benefits based on health status. This talk explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of consumers choice of health insurance plans, and suggests ways that regulation should be designed to cope with consumers’ cognitive infirmities.
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February 17, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Casper de Jong, retired insurance executive
Adverse selection occurs when insurance purchasers know more about their own riskiness than insurers do, and use that knowledge in deciding how much or what kind of insurance overage to purchase. Theory and much regulatory practice assume that this kind of informational asymmetry (favoring policyholders) is universal; but Mr. de Jong challenges this basic assumption, arguing instead that insurers typically know more about their policyholders’ riskiness than the policyholders themselves do. This talk explores the causes and consequences of this informational reversal.
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February 24, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Kyle Logue, University of Michigan Law School
Cyber-ransom poses difficult policy questions. On the one hand, the presence of insurance may actually increase the profitability of ransom-ware attacks and create incentives for more of them. On the other, properly constructed and well-regulated insurance offers a variety of pre- and post-breach services that can reduce the likelihood and severity of ransomware attacks. This talk discusses how best to structure insurance regulation to handle these difficult tradeoffs.
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March 3, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Ronen Avraham,  Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law
Insurance has well-known and important benefits; but it has an overlooked dark side as well. Insurers sometimes deny coverage unjustly, shifting short-term risks to insureds (or their victims) rather than reducing them. Worse, insurers might also act to increase long-term risks: They may provide suboptimal incentives for insureds to take care, as well as present wrongdoers with incentives to target insureds as victims. Further, insurers may block technological progress and lobby for inefficient regulation, even at the expense of more long-term risks to their insureds and society. Insurers may even invest in risky products and activities to increase the demand for insurance coverage against these very same risks. Wise policy requires taking account of the dark side of insurance.
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March 10, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Peter Kornman, retired attorney, Davis, Polk & Wardwell
Federal legislation known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) poses significant limits on the ability of state governments to regulate what would otherwise be the tortious behavior of arms manufacturers. This talk explores how state governments can operate at the intersection of insurance regulation, McCarran/Ferguson, and the PLCAA to regulate gun manufacturer liability.

March 24, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Geoffrey Clark, State University of New York at Potsdam
Insurance is commonly seen as a scientific application of statistical collection and probabilistic analysis to infer the value of risks. Viewed historically, however, insurance arose in a wider philosophical, religious, and political matrix in which claims to scientific knowledge and precision were just one, and not even the most important, component. This talk will survey how the origins of the life insurance business offer clues about how insurance was understood in its formative decades and how many people may understand the way insurance operates today.
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March 31, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Jessica Altman, Former Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Andrew Mais, Commissioner of the Connecticut Insurance Department
My Chi To, Executive Deputy Superintendent of Insurance at New York State Department of Financial Services
We present a panel discussion in which three distinguished regulators share their views on the difficult questions posed by race-based discrimination in insurance markets.

April 7, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Peter Siegelman, University of Connecticut School of Law
Gideon Parchomovsky, University of Pennsylvania Law School & Hebrew University Faculty of Law
Conventional moral hazard occurs when the transfer of risk from policyholder to insurer leads the former to reduce its level of precautions. We surface a related phenomenon: insurance can lead third parties (who are outside of the insurance contract) to increase loss- or claims-causing behavior. Such negative externalities from insurance are widespread, and the authors offer an explanation for their origins and discuss some policy implications.
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April 14, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Carolyn Kousky, University of Pennsylvania
The mid-Atlantic region of the United States is experiencing accelerated rates of sea level rise, increasing flooding. And the problem is worst for lower-income residents. Unfortunately, these same residents struggle with access to the needed financial resources to recover from floods. Such recovery is a necessary condition for broader urban disaster resilience. Despite this, flood coverage for low and middle-income residents is an under-researched aspect of climate adaptation. This talk reports on ongoing research to promote accessible flood insurance for lower-income communities, with a particular focus on New York City.
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April 21, 2022, 4 – 5 p.m. ET
Patricia McCoy, Boston College Law School
Sixty years ago, the majority of Americans realistically could hope to attain the middle class, today, virtually half of households struggle to make ends meet. This growing financial insecurity results from a massive transfer of financial risk from government and businesses onto individual households. This talk asks the question, when should households be expected to finance major financial milestones themselves and when should society bear more of those costs? The project draws on principles of pooling and spreading risk to propose a blueprint for better economic wellbeing for all.