Research Focus

Risk Infrastructure Group examines how climate-driven disasters propagate through the interconnected financial systems that underpin insurance availability, housing finance, and disaster recovery.

These domains are examined as interconnected systems through which climate-driven disasters propagate financial risk across insurance markets, housing finance, and public recovery institutions.

Our research is organized around four core domains:

  1. Property Insurance Market Stability

  2. Housing & Mortgage Finance

  3. Federal Disaster Recovery Systems

  4. Catastrophe Reinsurance Capital Markets

Property Insurance Market Stability

Climate-driven disasters are accelerating insurer withdrawal from exposed regions, concentrating risk in residual markets, and creating structural gaps in property insurance availability that affect homeowners, lenders, and municipal tax bases simultaneously.

RIG examines the conditions under which private insurance markets become structurally unavailable, how insurer portfolio volatility responds to correlated catastrophe exposure, and what market withdrawal dynamics mean for communities in high-risk regions.

Housing & Mortgage Finance

Disasters affect more than physical structures. When insurance availability collapses in a region, mortgage servicing becomes constrained, rebuilding capital becomes scarce, and housing market liquidity deteriorates in ways that extend well beyond the disaster perimeter.

RIG studies how catastrophic events disrupt the financial systems that underpin housing — with particular attention to the interaction between insurance claims resolution, lender requirements, and the availability of rebuilding capital in recovering communities.

Federal Disaster Recovery Systems

Federal disaster recovery operates through a complex of interdependent programs — FEMA individual assistance, SBA disaster lending, HUD community development block grants, and the National Flood Insurance Program — each with distinct eligibility criteria, timelines, and institutional constraints.

RIG analyzes how these programs interact with private insurance claims resolution, where gaps and delays emerge, and how program design shapes rebuilding timelines and long-term community recovery outcomes.

Reinsurance Capital Markets

Reinsurance capital plays a foundational role in sustaining primary insurance markets. When reinsurance becomes unavailable or unaffordable in climate-exposed regions, the effects propagate directly into primary insurance availability, pricing, and market structure.

RIG examines how correlated climate exposures, catastrophe risk aggregation, and capital allocation dynamics in reinsurance markets affect the long-term stability of insurance availability — and what these dynamics mean for housing finance and disaster recovery systems downstream.

Resilience Investment & Insurability

Across all four domains, RIG examines how resilience investments and risk-mitigation frameworks are increasingly shaping insurability, rebuilding capacity, and the financial stability of disaster-exposed communities.

This crosscutting theme reflects a core analytical proposition: that the financial systems governing insurance, housing, and disaster recovery cannot be examined in isolation from the physical risk mitigation decisions that determine exposure in the first place.

Research Focus publications and working papers will be released as the platform develops its research agenda. Inquiries from potential collaborators and institutional partners are welcomed.