Property insurance loss distributions

Abstract

Property Claim Services (PCS) provides indices for losses resulting from catastrophic events in the US. In this paper we study these indices and take a closer look at distributions underlying insurance claims. Surprisingly, the lognormal distribution seems to give a better fit than the Paretian one. Moreover, lagged autocorrelation study reveals a mean-reverting structure of indices returns.Econophysics; Property insurance; Loss distribution; PCS index;