Property Insurance and Disaster Risk: New Evidence from Mortgage Escrow Data

We develop a new dataset to study homeowners insurance. Our data on over 47 million observations of households’ property insurance expenditures from 2014-2023 are inferred from mortgage escrow payments. First, we find a sharp 33% increase in average premiums from 2020 to 2023 (13% in real terms) that is highly uneven across geographies. This growth is associated with a stronger relationship between premiums and local disaster risk: A one standard-deviation increase in disaster risk is associated with $500 higher premiums in 2023, up from $300 in 2018. Second, using the rapid rise in reinsurance prices as a natural experiment, we show that the increase in the risk-to-premium gradient was largely caused by the pass-through of reinsurance costs. Third, we project that if the reinsurance shock persists, growing disaster risk will lead climate-exposed households to face $700 higher annual premiums by 2053. Our results highlight that prices in global reinsurance markets pass through to household budgets, and will ultimately drive the cost of rising climate risk.