The Market for Reinsurance

Abstract

Using a unique proprietary data set of primary insurers and reinsurers, we analyze the structure of the reinsurance market. The data set, which spans six years, contains quotes for different reinsurance layers, for different treaties, for different clients, and for different lines of business. There are in fact close to 20,000 quotes for close to 1,000 reinsurance treaties, 70% of which have more than one layer. This is the first study that documents the actual structure of the global reinsurance market using actual quotes, and not only the wining quote, for a large number of layers of a large number of reinsurance treaties. We find that reinsurance treaties have generally become more complex over the years. We also find an interesting linear pattern is the distribution of the quotes by line of insurance.

Keywords: Reinsurance, reinsurance tranches, risk management, market structure