Purchasing reinsurance reduces insurers’ insolvency risk by stabilising loss experience, increasing capacity, limiting liability on specific risks and/or protecting against catastrophes. Consequently, purchasing reinsurance should reduce capital costs. However, transferring risk to reinsurers is expensive. The cost of reinsurance for an insurer can be much larger than the actuarial price of the risk transferred. In this article, we analyse empirically the costs and the benefits of reinsurance for a sample of U.S. property–liability insurers. The results show that the purchase of reinsurance significantly increases insurers’ costs but significantly reduces the volatility of the loss ratio. With purchasing reinsurance, insurers accept to pay higher costs of insurance production to reduce their underwriting risk.

购买再保险通过稳定损失经历，提高能力，限制对特定风险的责任和/或防止灾难来降低保险公司的破产风险。因此，购买再保险应降低资本成本。但是，将风险转移给再保险公司是昂贵的。保险公司的再保险成本可能远大于所转移风险的精算价格。在本文中，我们对美国财产责任保险公司样本中的再保险费用和收益进行了实证分析。结果表明，购买再保险显着增加了保险公司的成本，但显着降低了损失率的波动性。通过购买再保险，保险公司接受支付更高的保险生产成本以降低承保风险。