The thesis first describes reinsurance and its contractual forms, and then examines reinsurance market cycles, that is, the alternation between hard and soft market conditions reflected in changes in reinsurance prices. As a measure of price, I use the Guy Carpenter Global Property Catastrophe Rate-on-Line index for the period from 1990 to 2026. I treat the index as an annual time series and fit a second-order autoregressive model, AR(2). The estimated model has complex conjugate characteristic roots whose modulus is smaller than one and therefore describes stationary damped cyclical dynamics. The argument of the roots implies a characteristic cycle length of approximately 7.7 years. The result is consistent with the historical behaviour of the market and with the capacity-constraint explanation of reinsurance cycles.
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