Against marine risk: Margins determination of ocean marine insurance

Abstract

As the origin of modern insurance, ocean marine insurance exhibits numerous distinctive characteristics compared with the rest of the property/casualty insurances. This paper originally investigates the determination of the underwriting margin of ocean marine insurance, which is the crucial component of the ocean marine insurance price. Focused on industry-wide level, earlier studies ignored the time series characteristics of underwriting margin to utilize conventional regression, or employed time series methods but were limited with the stationary property of variables. Consistent with prior empirical studies despite of whether considerable variables have unit roots, an ARDL approach for underwriting margins in U.S. ocean marine insurance market during the sample period: 1951-2001 demonstrates that the financial pricing hypothesis [3] is the most suitable model. Such results confirm several unique features of ocean marine insurance market and give reasonable explanation of underwriting cycle, which is a familiar fluctuations progress in marine insurance market.