It looks like Wellington Council officials are providing councilors with an offer they're not supposed to refuse. Earlier this week, Cou...

It's not quite the kind of parametric insurance offering I've been after, but it's getting closer to it. Bounce Insurance now pr...

Navigating post-earthquake Christchurch was tough. Every day brought a new set of road closures to route around. And they weren't always...

This morning's worthies on the closing of the browser tabs: This one was a long time coming: difficulty in insuring apartments in Well...

This afternoon's worthies on closing out the accumulated browser tabs: Russell Brown on cannabis reform , including links through to ...

Thanks to Newshub , we now know that the government-owned insurer Southern Response had private investigators snooping around after earthqua...

Seventh anniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes. GNS figures there's about a 1/120 annual risk of something of similar size hittin...

I didn't enjoy the Christchurch earthquakes. But at least as bad as the earthquakes were the depressing policy failures that followed. P...

A few worthies from some accumulated closing of the browser tabs: The UK's drinking guidelines aren't particularly evidence-based....

Courtney Place pub Molly Malone's was damaged in last year's earthquake. The building is old, but not heritage-listed. So it fortun...

Wellington's quake-prone heritage-listed buildings remain scary. My column in this week's NBR  ($) suggests prioritising the risky ...

New Zealand's Human Rights Commission says that property rights need to be protected in the Bill of Rights.   I couldn't agree mo...

Vero de Rugy has a great summary of Virgil Storr's work for the Mercatus Centre on hurricane recovery in New Orleans. There are a lot ...

Christchurch's game of SimCity continues. Has it been 6 years already? Part of the Grand Plan for downtown had the Crown buying up blo...

When we moved to Christchurch, we'd always chuckle a little when driving south down the state highway. Rolleston, the first town south o...

I remain a bit puzzled as to why I have been utterly unable to convince any insurer to provide me a quote for earthquake insurance for Welli...

Tyler at Marginal Revolution points to interesting new insurance contracts where companies can insure against their celebrity spokesperson...

Hoisted from the comments, here's some sensible comments from one of my former students, Tom Quirk, on the National Disaster Fund : H...

Hugh Paveltich emails: The “seismic assessment” fiasco is just more of the same … political and bureaucratic failure on a massive scale. ...

Usually, harrowing individual cases make for terrible law. In this case, it's been rather the opposite. Ann Brower was the only survi...