The SCOR-Geneva Risk and Insurance Review Best Paper Award went to Christian Gollier, Professor of Economics and Managing Director at the Toulouse School of Economics, for his article “Pandemic economics: optimal dynamic confinement under uncertainty and learning”, which was published in the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, September 2020, 80-93. The article explores the role of uncertainty and learning on the optimal dynamic lockdown policy. It shows that, in the absence of uncertainty, the optimal confinement policy is to impose a constant rate of lockdown until the suppression of the virus in the population, but that introducing uncertainty about the reproduction number of deconfined people reduces the optimal initial rate of confinement.

The SCOR-EGRIE Young Economist Award⁽¹⁾ went to Julia Holzapfel of the LMU Munich School of Management, for her article “Classification risk in health insurance: The interaction of prevention and guaranteed renewable insurance”, which shows that Guaranteed Renewable contracts which reward investments in prevention but do not use genetic information in pricing can be a good compromise to offer classification risk insurance at an attractive price without disadvantaging individuals with an unfortunate genetic endowment. However, if prevention varies greatly between individuals, those with the most productive prevention technologies have no incentive to exploit their potential to reduce health costs. Therefore, there is a need for additional health campaigns targeting those individuals

Both awards are organized under the aegis of the “Risk Markets and Value Creation” Chair, which brings together the SCOR Foundation for Science and the Toulouse School of Economics.

André Lévy-Lang, Chairman of the SCOR Foundation, comments: “These two awards demonstrate the vigor of the partnership between the Foundation and the Toulouse School of Economics with the SCOR-TSE “Risk Markets and Value Creation” chair, which is pushing back the frontiers of our knowledge on new economic fields such as genetics and pandemics.”

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The European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists (EGRIE), created by the Geneva Association in 1973, is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting research on risk and insurance. It notably publishes the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review and organizes scientific conferences. 

⁽¹⁾Open to economists under 40 years of age