Managing Risk in Reinsurance

Niels Viggo Hauter; Geoffrey  Jones

Book | 2017

Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming

by Niels Viggo Hauter and Geoffrey Jones

Abstract

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive history of the reinsurance industry from the nineteenth century to the present day. Reinsurance developed at the fringe of financial services and, for most of its existence, was largely unnoticed outside the expert community. However more recently public and professional sensitivity towards managing risks has increased. This book traces the global development of reinsurance and explores how the nature of risk itself has changed over time. It highlights key aspects that have shaped the evolving industry, including shifts in risk engineering and risk management, the development of actuarial science, and the impact of changes in political and regulatory contexts. The authors point to the special role reinsurers have played in the capitalist system. As the industry developed, it had a vested interest in preventing excessive risks, while also providing complex societies with a mechanism to limit the damage that natural and other catastrophes inflicted. This has led reinsurers, once a very secretive industry, to take increasingly public stances on the risk of human-induced climate change and the need to take urgent action to contain it.

Keywords: globalization; Insurance; risk management; business history; Globalization; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; Africa; Europe; Latin America; North and Central America; Asia;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Hauter, Niels Viggo and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

The case is concerned with Elia Nuqul, the founder of Jordanian-based Nuqul Brothers, a large diversified business group. It shows how Nuqul, a Christian Palestinian whose family was forced to flee to Jordan after the creation of Israel in 1948, built a business in his new home, first in trading and later in consumer products such as hygienic paper manufacturing. The case shows the challenges of building such an entrepreneurial business in a developing region with high political instability. The case is positioned within the wider context of the regional conflict in Palestine and Israel, and it provides a vehicle for exploring the role and responsibility of entrepreneurs, if any, in such conflicts.

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2018 (Revised April 2020)

Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent

Geoffrey Jones and Emily Grandjean

This case describes the career of the iconic French fashion designer Coco Chanel who created a transformational business during the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in her early adulthood, Chanel leveraged relationships with acquaintances, friends, and romantic partners to build her fashion business and legendary luxury brand based on understated elegance. Chanel’s famous “little black dress” was accompanied by many other innovations including the use of jersey as material for daytime clothing and her development of the Chanel No. 5 perfume. The case pays close attention to the importance of Chanel’s networks among the cultural elite and European high society. It explores how she embraced the rise of Anti-Semitism among many members of the upper class at that time. During World War II, Chanel lived in the Ritz Hotel in Paris in occupied France, where she entered into a romantic relationship with a high-ranking German intelligence officer. Subsequently, Chanel herself became an intelligence operative for the Nazis. The case ends with Chanel in Switzerland in 1945 after she departed France following the Liberation of Paris by Allied forces. This case can be used to explore multiple issues including creating and building an iconic fashion brand, entrepreneurship, and ethical responsibility of business.

Keywords: Business History; Biography; Entrepreneurship; Relationships; Brands and Branding; Ethics; Fashion Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry;

Citation:

Jones, Geoffrey, and Emily Grandjean. "Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent." Harvard Business School Case 318-139, April 2018. (Revised April 2020.) View Details

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Examines the career of Ernesto Tornquist, a cosmopolitan financier considered to be the most significant entrepreneur in Argentina at the end of the 19th century. Tornquist created a diversified business group, linked to the political elite, which integrated Argentina into the trading and financial networks of the first global economy. Provides an opportunity to understand why Argentina was such a successful economy at this time, and to debate whether its very success laid the basis for the country's subsequent poor economic performance.

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Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming

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