We are pleased to have welcomed Associate Professor Benjamin Collier to our department this academic year. Professor Collier is a leading scholar focusing on sustainability and climate risk, examining how businesses and households financially manage hurricanes, severe storms, and other natural disasters. His work has been featured in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Harvard Business Review. Closer to home, he has been quoted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since moving to Wisconsin.
How insurance markets respond to growing climate risk is the key question. “Insurance has the potential to play a critical role in adaptation… While growing risk heightens the need for insurance, both demand- and supply-side challenges are contributing to a troubling decline in coverage,” Professor Collier says. “My research is part of a field trying to understand these dynamics and how insurance markets and public policies can be structured to facilitate climate resilience.”
Creating and teaching a new course this spring demonstrates a segment of Collier’s interest. The course Catastrophe Risk and Reinsurance covers catastrophe markets, including reinsurance and insurance-linked securities, how these products work, and the types of risks they cover; catastrophe risk models, which estimate potential losses by simulating thousands of possible disaster scenarios; and market–public policy design, which explores approaches to managing catastrophe risk and key design principles including hurricanes, floods, terrorism, and cyber risks. This new course equips our students with valuable insight into an important and rapidly evolving area of risk management.
Professor Collier came to us from Temple University. Prior, he was a research fellow and postdoctoral fellow at the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His work on catastrophe financing and recovery is often cited in the press and his research is influential with policymakers. For example, his work was cited last year in the Federal Register as an impetus for a reform to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Disaster Loan Program.
Collier holds master of science degrees in psychology and economics, and a doctorate in agricultural economics, all from the University of Kentucky.
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