In this two-volume work, Niehaus (finance and insurance, Moore School of Business, U. of South Carolina) collects 34 papers from the literature on the economics of insurance and risk
management, basing his choices on the overall purpose of the Business Economics Series, "which is to assemble research that emphasizes more practical contributions that meet the needs of
economists working in business schools," in addition to favoring newer articles over classic papers that have already appeared elsewhere (the included papers were originally published between
1982 and 2005). The first volume is dedicated to the subject of the economics of insurance markets. Its papers are organized into sections on risk pooling, insurer capital, and ownership
structure; adverse selection and classification; pricing and underwriting cycles; and miscellaneous public policy issues, including race and redlining in auto insurance pricing, incentive
effects of no-fault automobile insurance, deregulation of property-casualty insurance pricing, and time-consistent health insurance. The second volume deals with the less mature field of
corporate risk management and includes papers addressing the basic theory of why corporations with diversified shareholders attempt to reduce risk, empirical evidence on why and how firms
manage risk, and the interrelated topics of risk measurement and enterprise risk management. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)