Online registration for this event is closed. Walk-in registrations will be accepted.

Economic events in recent months have underscored the large role that the federal government plays as both an explicit and implicit insurer of a wide range of economic activities. For everything from terrorism, crops, floods, and natural catastrophes, to private pensions and bank deposits, the government has established programs that seek to spread financial risks across a broader cross section of the population and over time. Such benefits, however, often come with substantial costs: many of these programs impose unfunded liabilities on taxpayers that are not fully recognized in the federal budget.

Speakers at this conference will analyze whether the theoretical gains from government intervention--such as the ability to overcome some forms of market failures--are realized in practice. While markets can fail to produce efficient insurance outcomes, government programs often suffer from their own failures, such as the difficulty of implementing or sustaining risk-based pricing in a political environment. Do public insurance programs improve social welfare, or does government intervention expose the public to further risk through inefficient programs that would be better handled by the private sector?