AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE INSURANCE INSTITUTE OF CANADA AND THE JOURNAL ASSURANCES
by Les Dandridge and Rémi Moreau

ARTICLES ÉVALUÉS

RISK SECURITIZATION
by Gary Tobin

VALEURS EXTRÊMES DES SINISTRES CLIMATIQUES
par Daniel Zajdenweber

LA PERCEPTION DU RISQUE D’ÊTRE ARRÊTÉ CHEZ LES CAMIONNEURS ET TRANSPORTEURS ROUTIERS
par Georges Dionne, Denise Desjardins, Marie-Gloriose Ingabire
et Rachid Aqdim

ARTICLES GÉNÉRAUX

L’OBLIGATION DE DÉFENDRE REVISITÉE À LA LUMIÈRE DE
L’ARRÊT SCALERA
par Rémi Moreau

LE RÔLE DES ASSUREURS EN MATIÈRE DE PRÉVENTION DES INONDATIONS
par Roland Nussbaum 

Chroniques

FAITS D'ACTUALITÉ
par Rémi Moreau

CHRONIQUE ACTUARIELLE
par divers collaborateurs du Groupe-conseil AON

CHRONIQUE JURIDIQUE
par Rémi Moreau

CHRONIQUE DE DOCUMENTATION
par Rémi Moreau

GARANTIES PARTICULIÈRES
par Rémi Moreau

INDEX DES SUJETS ET DES AUTEURS
par Rémi Moreau

THE INTERNET SURFER PAGE
 
 
 

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE INSURANCE INSTITUTE OF CANADA AND THE JOURNAL ASSURANCES
by Les Dandridge and Rémi Moreau

The Internet is obviously a driving force that is here to stay. The insurance industry, as every segment of the economy, continues its penetration into the virtual world (e-commerce, business to business or business to consumer transactions). The publishing industry is also experiencing spectacular change in order both to survive and to respond to the needs of readers.

To this end, the Journal Assurances is proud to announce a recent agreement with the Insurance Institute of Canada. The Institute has a website which contains a vast amount of information of interest to students and members. Within the website is an exclusive,  password-protected area for the Chartered Insurance Professional (CIP) Society members. So, beginning with this April 2001 issue, all the articles from Assurances will be mounted in a special area of this web site, to be named AssurancesLink. Included will be the academic or professional articles, the chroniques, and the list of the Journal’s contributors. CIP Society members can link directly from their site to those of the Journal Assurances contributors.

The opening page is designed to present and describe the publication, its history (established by Gérard Parizeau in 1932), its involvment with the Risk Management Chair of the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, which actually has the mandate to publish the Journal Assurances.
The articles will be stored in PDF format, so CIP Society members will be able to easily print them. The articles will be archived on the site for a period of three years, which is the term of this agreement.

Thanks to the three-year accord, the 9,000 members of the CIP Society have exclusive on-line access to the Journal Assurances, which has an international reputation for high-level research and practical information. By virtue of its mission, the quarterly Journal Assurances closely observes the insurance industry, the evolution of the financial institutions sector and risk management techniques.

Not only will this partnership agreement make the Journal Assurances available to CIP Society members, but it will also provide the opportunity to publish particular research, analysis or articles of interest from the Institute. From the standpoint of the Journal, it represents a guarantee by an important group of subscribers. We are confident that this agrement will contribute to enhance the value of this publication both in terms of quality of content and exposure.
 
 
 

RISK SECURITIZATION
by Gary Tobin

This paper is intended to shed some light on securitization, an evolving instrument for managing risk, specifically adressing those risks involving bond issues. This tool may be new to the insurance industry, but it has been around in the financial markets since the mid-seventies in the U.S., and is currently gaining acceptability in other countries.

Keywords: Bonds, climatic catastrophes, risk securitization, securitization.
 
 

VALEURS EXTRÊMES DES SINISTRES CLIMATIQUES
par Daniel Zajdenweber

Recent climatic catastrophes (windstorms, hurricanes, floods, droughts, freezes, etc) that have struck the developed economies in North America and in Europe, entailed huge losses, some of them amounting to ten billions US$. The objective of this article is to analyze the statistical distribution of the severity of climatic catastrophes, whatever their origins, while linking it to the probabilistic theory of extreme values. Data published by the National Oceanic and Atlantic Administration (NOAA) spanning the last 21 years (1980-2000) on the 48 climatic events that cost at least one billion US$ in the United States, show that there is a good fit between theory and empirical evidences. The statistical distribution belongs to the Pareto type without expectation. In other words, the average value of climatic losses depends on the value of the largest potential loss, that is the largest economic value exposed to any climatic event.

After a brief recall on the theory of extreme values, this article analyzes the nature of the statistical distribution and estimates its parameters. It describes the consequences of this particular loss distribution on the valuation of «weather catastrophe » insurance policies, and it proposes a kind of «catbond» that could cope with extremely large losses.

Keywords : Extreme distributions, catbond, fat tail, Fréchet distribution, Hill estimator, infinite expectation, Pareto distribution, weather catastrophes.
 

LA PERCEPTION DU RISQUE D’ÊTRE ARRÊTÉ CHEZ LES CAMIONNEURS ET TRANSPORTEURS ROUTIERS
par Georges Dionne, Denise Desjardins, Marie-Gloriose Ingabire
et Rachid Aqdim

The primary objective of this research was to see how biases in the way economic agents perceive risks can affect their traffic safety behaviors. Three main risks are studied: fear of arrest for a traffic violation; fear of heavy penalties; and fear of the length of such penalties. We took a two-step approach. First, we used a survey to measure the biases of drivers and transporters, and then we looked at how these measurement results compared with their behavior as reflected in the number of demerit points and accidents on their record. To be more precise, the two-step analysis proceeded as follows: (1) for each of the biases studied, truckers and transporters were asked questions designed to allow comparison of their perceptions of risk with objective data; (2) indicators for individuals’ perceptual biases were then used as explanatory variables in analyzing the distribution of violations and accidents. The results are summarized in the conclusion of the article.

Keywords: Perception bias, traffic violation, severity of penalty, length of penalty, road accidents, professional drivers, trucking firms, transportation of people.

JEL Classification: D80.
 
 
 

LE RÔLE DES ASSUREURS EN MATIÈRE DE PRÉVENTION DES INONDATIONS
par Roland Nussbaum 

To know and to prevent natural perils, especially flood is the central task of MRN (Mission des sociétés d’assurance pour la connaissance et la prévention des risques naturels), newly established as an association supported by FFSA (Fédération Française des Sociétés d’Assurances) and GEMA (Groupement des Entreprises Mutuelles d’Assurance).

In this short article, the author, who is the actual manager of MNR, explains why and how such an association was set up and organized by the insurance profession to centralize cooperation actions between insurance industry and national or regional public organisms.