How Are Climate Risks Being Priced?: Insurance Markets and Adaptation Incentives
Meredith Fowlie, Professor
Agricultural and Resource Economics
Applications for Fall 2025 are closed for this project.
As the climate changes, households are increasingly exposed to both physical and financial risks. From a homeowner’s perspective, one of the clearest manifestations of this shift is the rising cost of property insurance in high-hazard areas. Insurance premium increases can
convey important information about risk exposure and create incentives for adaptation investments — but they also raise pressing concerns about affordability and access, particularly for lower-income households.
We are constructing a dataset that will support an analysis of how climate risks are being priced across the American West, how insurance costs are distributed across households, and how pricing structures and building codes could jointly influence adaptation behavior in high-risk
areas. Our results synthesis will be geared towards informing policy responses to the increasing cost of homeowners insurance, including ways to mitigate risks of property losses caused byadverse weather events.
Role: Undergraduates will assist the primary investigators with a number of data-intensive tasks. These tasks include:
- Working with insurers' regulatory rate filings to collect information about property insurance pricing formulas and risk mitigation discounts.
- Working with proprietary datasets to collect parcel-level information about building codes and wildfire safety regulations.
Qualifications: Some experience with automated data extraction from web platforms/ systematic data harvesting will be very useful
Experience with data cleaning and preprocessing/preparation for analysis-ready datasets would be a plus.
An active interest in environmental economics (prior coursework in this field is a plus but not essential).
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Meredith Fowlie
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Environmental Issues Social Sciences