We develop a model where a free genetic test reveals whether the individual tested has a low or high probability of developing a disease. A costly prevention e¤ort allows high-risk agents to decrease the probability of developing the disease. Agents are not obliged to take the test, but must disclose its results to insurers. Insurers o¤er separating contracts which take into account the individ...

Many insurance and reinsurance contracts are contingent on events such as hurricanes, terrorist attacks or political upheavals whose probabilities are not known with precision. There is a body of experimental evidence showing that higher premiums are charged for these “ambiguous” contracts, which may in turn inhibit (re)insurance transactions, but little research analysing explicitly how and wh...

Insurers sell retail financial products called variable annuities that package mutual funds with minimum return guarantees over long horizons. Variable annuities accounted for $1.5 trillion or 34 percent of U.S. life insurer liabilities in 2015. Sales fell and fees increased after the 2008 financial crisis as the higher valuation of existing liabilities stressed risk-based capital. Insurers als...

Agricultural production is subject to high risk associated with environmental and agro-ecological conditions. Farmers continuously make decisions to mitigate the various adversities. This study evaluates farm households’ willingness to pay for agricultural risk insurance intervention introduced in Ethiopia in 2009. A bidding game approach is used to elicit willingness-to-pay. We use a unique da...

Despite standard economic models that assume stability of preferences, empirical work on insurance choice has documented a surprising lack of stability of risk preferences across domains. We hypothesize that informational differences can partly explain the observed empirical regularities, and test our hypothesis by conducting lab and field experiments with over 4,000 participants. We exogenousl...

The epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) is responsible for Na(+) and fluid absorption across colon, kidney, and airway epithelia. Short palate lung and nasal epithelial clone 1 (SPLUNC1) is a secreted, innate defense protein and an autocrine inhibitor of ENaC that is highly expressed in airway epithelia. While SPLUNC1 has a bactericidal permeability-increasing protein (BPI)-type structure, its NH2...

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. Most studies cannot determine whether the large differences in healthcare utilization between the insured and the uninsured are due to insurance status or to other unobserved differences between the two groups. In this paper, we exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that resul...

The P4 helix is an essential element of ribonuclease P (RNase P) that is believed to bind catalytically important metals. Here, we applied a combination of NMR residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) and a recently introduced domain-elongation strategy for measuring "motionally decoupled" relaxation data to characterize the structural dynamics of the P4 helix from Bacillus subtilis RNase P. In the ab...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of neurodegenerative disease. Beta-amyloid peptides (Aβ) are responsible for neuronal death both in vitro and in vivo. Previously, L17 and F19 residues were identified as playing key roles in the stabilization of the Aβ40 conformation and in the reduction of its neurotoxicity. In this study, the effects of L17A/F19A mutations on the neurotoxicity of A...

We use the recently derived CP phase dependent analytic results for the supersymmetric electroweak correction to gm22 to constrain the explicit CP phases in softly broken supersymmetry using the new physics effect seen in the g22 Brookhaven measurement. It is shown that the BNL data strongly constrain the CP violating phase um ~the phase of the Higgs mixing parameter m) and j2 @the phase of the...