---
title: "When insurers leave (research idea)"
description: "Insurance appears on more than 400 recent papers in the finance and economics journals, but only 52 of them carry a climate or disaster keyword, and property insurance barely appears. As insurers withdraw from wildfire- and hurricane-prone regions, who holds the risk, and what happens to house prices and mortgages?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/insurers-retreat-from-climate-risk
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/insurers-retreat-from-climate-risk.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "When insurers leave (research idea): Insurance appears on more than 400 recent papers in the finance and economics journals, but only 52 of them carry a climate or disaster keyword, and property insurance barely appears."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["finance", "economics", "climate"]
keywords: ["insurance demand", "natural disasters", "catastrophic risk"]
---

# When insurers leave

Insurance appears on more than 400 recent papers in the finance and economics journals, but only 52 of them carry a climate or disaster keyword, and property insurance barely appears. As insurers withdraw from wildfire- and hurricane-prone regions, who holds the risk, and what happens to house prices and mortgages?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 408 papers carry an insurance keyword (196 in finance journals, 174 in economics), the most frequent being health, life, unemployment and deposit insurance. Only 52 of them also carry a wildfire, flood, climate, disaster, hurricane or catastrophe keyword, and "property insurance" appears on a single paper. "Natural disasters" appears on 82 papers.

## Questions

- When private insurers stop writing policies in a region, how much do house prices and mortgage lending fall, and who buys the homes?
- Do state-backed insurers of last resort, which are growing fast, price risk, or hide it?
- Does the retreat change where people and businesses move, and how quickly?

## Data that could help

Insurer market-exit filings and non-renewal rates by county, state insurer-of-last-resort enrolment, house transactions and mortgage originations (HMDA).

## Next step

Build a county panel of insurer exits and non-renewals for California and Florida since 2018, and relate it to house price growth and mortgage volumes.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| insurance demand | 0 | – | 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 2, 1, 0 | 37 |
| natural disasters | 5 | #393 | 5, 5, 3, 8, 4, 8, 1, 10, 7, 8, 5, 12, 9, 9, 11, 8, 9, 9, 4, 7, 2, 9, 6, 11, 7, 10, 8, 5, 5, 6, 8, 3, 9, 8, 10, 4, 5 | 253 |
| catastrophic risk | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0 | 19 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). When insurers leave. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/insurers-retreat-from-climate-risk

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-insurers-retreat-from-climate-risk,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {When insurers leave},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/insurers-retreat-from-climate-risk}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).