ASTIN Masterclass: The Insurance-Risk Landscape: An Eclectic Survey by Michael Powers

“The Insurance-Risk Landscape: An Eclectic Survey” is a Masterclass video series written and narrated by Professor Michael R. Powers of Tsinghua University. Through a collection of ten engaging episodes, Professor Powers navigates the metaphorical landscape formed by the many manifestations of insurance risk — from natural and human-made perils to insurance company insolvency. Along the way, he stops to explore some of the most intriguing twists and turns in the landscape, with an ability to make the complex simple, and the simple profound. The eclectic choice of topics includes:

• the origins of insurance, with relevant insights for today’s markets;
• the roles of randomness, complexity, and uncertainty in generating losses;
• rationales for the most commonly used frequency and severity distributions;
• the interplay between hedging and diversification in risk finance;
• explanations (and common misconceptions) of insurability and underwriting criteria;
• the meaning and implications of heavy-tailed losses;
• the nature of the property-liability underwriting “cycle”;
• the opposing effects of advancing technologies on insurance markets