BACKGROUND As the world's largest developing country, China has entered into the epidemiological phase characterized by high life expectancy and high morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases. Cardiovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and malignant tumors have become the leading causes of death since the 1990s. Constant payments for maintaining the health status of a ...

Longer lifespans are generally seen as a positive outcome of economic growth. Yet life extension also means that more people face the risk of living too long -that is, outliving their assets and means of support. A range of financial products exists currently or can be envisioned for the future that would be useful in helping to protect people against having to dramatically curtail consumption ...

Systemic risk to financial markets is often defined as the risk of a major and rapid disruption in one or more of the core functions of the financial system caused by the initial failure of one or more financial firms or a segment of the financial system ([3], p. 3.) This widely accepted definition sets systemic risks in financial markets as a different class of risk agents in the market face, ...

Many of the origins of the recent financial crisis were in the United States, beginning with subprime mortgages and mortgage securities. As the crisis spread globally, few market participants or regulatory authorities saw it coming, and all underestimated its severity. In the United States, the crisis has sparked many proposals to address its perceived causes and prevent a recurrence. Proposals...

This paper seeks to establish empirically that institutions matter to financial markets. To this end, I look at the impact of five different regional trade agreements (RTAs) on a composite of four different financial instruments that account for default risk on sovereign debt in developing countries. As expected, some of the agreements have a stronger impact on default risk than others. Althoug...

Credit risk is quantified by the loss distribution due to unexpected changes in the credit quality of the counterparty in a financial contract. Default correlation risk refers to the risk that a bundle of risky obligors may default together. To understand the clustering phenomena in correlated defaults, we consider credit contagion models which describe the propagation of financial distress fro...