The occurrence of numerous dramatic and sudden catastrophic events has prompted insurers to improve disaster prevention and management procedures. In this context a variety of tools/techniques have been developed and have extended the limits of insurances offered alternative solutions to traditional insurance. Italy, among other european countries, is at greater risk of environmental catastrophe and at the same time it is part of the small number of industrialized countries where there is no obligation to insure against natural disasters. Insurance Linked Securities (ILS), in addition to the development of catastrophic simulation models, can provide development prospects for the transfer of insurance risk to the capital market and relieve the State burden for the coverage of damages.

The interaction between State and Insurance has different characteristics depending on product lines and countries. It spreads from defining the regulatory framework, underwriting insurance products, compelling some types of insurance and covering losses after an event as insurer of last resort. Some central governments mainly self insure withdrawing from the general taxation system, some others buy private insurance coverage. Anyway there are leveraging skills opportunities and growing capacity to allocate risks efficiently and retain only the portion that is uninsurable coming from the interaction between private insurance and State. This work aim to shed light on the connections of States and the Insurance industry in the line of business of insurance of natural disasters in the Italian case.

Recent developments in MiFID regulation about financial products’ distribution assesses the process of product governance of complex products by financial institutions. The due diligence that should be consequently fulfilled involves adequate internal controls for products and services development in order to avoid detrimental practices toward clients. One of the key points of the regulation is that institutions have to demonstrate that retail clients have sufficient financial knowledge and experience to understand the key features, benefits and risks involved in the investment proposed. Aim of this article is to shed light on the break even analysis as an appropriate practice half on the way between retail client cognitive abilities and financial institutions rules of disclosure in the case of interest rate swap products.

In the last decade, the stock returns volatility has been at the core of theoretical and empirical analysis, thanks to the evolution of technology and new software. The volatility process is concerned with the evolution of conditional variance of the asset return over time. This is a subject of remarkable interest because the variability of asset returns is time dependent and appears in clusters. In this paper, we investigate some new experimental extensions of the Multiplicative Error Model. This model has been introduced by Engle (2002) for positive valued processes and it is specified as the product of a conditionally autoregressive scale factor and an innovation process with positive support. We apply these models to the volatility of ‘STOXX Balkan 50 Equal Weight’ Index, which represents the largest and most liquid companies across eight Balkan countries. We use R 2.12.2 for the optimization, a free package for statistical computing and graphics.

La maggior frequenza di fenomeni meteorologici estremi e il potenziale aumento delle specie alloctone e invasive che ne consegue influenzano la produttività agricola e la stabilità dei redditi delle relative aziende. Pertanto, in previsione di una intensificazione di tali processi, è fondamentale acquisire la giusta consapevolezza del problema per cercare di definire sia le strategie volte a correggere le attività che causano e influenzano la frequenza con la quale tali accadimenti si presentano che le azioni attivabili dalle aziende agricole per difendersi e limitare i danni, in termini economici, strutturali e organizzativi. È stato evidenziato, quindi, come i rischi derivanti dai cambiamenti climatici impattano sulla struttura dei costi e di conseguenza sul reddito aziendale. Dopo aver descritto sinteticamente lo stato dell’arte della copertura assicurativa del settore agricolo, sono state prospettate le possibili evoluzioni in campo assicurativo e riassicurativo per un possibile scenario di miglioramento del sistema di copertura dei rischi meteorologici relativamente al settore considerato.