Thursday, May 22, 2014

Better Construction Matters!

Later this summer, a journal article Jeff Czajkowski of Wharton and I co-authored will appear in Land Economics.  But a shorter version of the research was published last week in Visualize, an insurance industry publication.  The link to the article is here:


We were interested to see if better enforcement of building codes could translate into lower damage when a hazard strikes a community.  The hazard we studied was hail, which is one of the costliest hazards for insured losses.  To determine the degree to which building codes were enforced we used the Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule (BCEGS) which is administered by the Insurance Services Office (ISO).  Damage data came from two sources, industry level damage from ISO and exposure level damage from Travelers Insurance.  We found that the difference in insured losses between communities with the higher ratings and those with no rating was a reduction in losses of about 20%.   

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