dam, Dasgupta, and Titman (2007) predict that when there are more companies within the industry, the incentive to hedge increases. One possible explanation to this is that a higher numbers of firms within the industry push down the margin between price and cost, and as a result, unhedged firms are likely to suffer as a result of the cost shock. Similar to the findings of Allayannis and Ihrig (2001), firms in a more competitive environment find it hard to adjust price according to changes in cost. Hence, firms in a more competitive landscape are exposed to more risks, and they tend to hedge more. On the other hand, Mello and Ruckes (2008) argue that the firms that tend to hedge less may be more exposed to competitive market conditions, but can benefit more from a higher cash flow state. This is in line with Adam and Nain (2013) who find that hedging has a negative relationship with the intensity of competition. I capture the competition level by considering the number of firms. I take a log of the number of insurers for each year to avoid the influence of magnitude of this variable, since there are more than 2,000 insurers each year. I call this variable NumIns, representing the total number of insurers at a given time.