Background Health insurance has been acknowledged by researchers as a valuable tool in health financing. In spite of its significance, a subscription paralysis has been observed in India for this product. People who can afford health insurance are also found to be either ignorant or aversive towards it. This study is designed to investigate into the socio-economic factors, individuals’ health i...

Using a unique insurance dataset for a sample of Chinese publicly listed companies for the period 1997 through 2003, this study tests the simultaneous linkages between debt capacity, cost of debt, and corporate property insurance. Our results suggest that, on the one hand, a higher cost of debt appears to motivate the use of more property insurance, but high leverage alone does not lead to the ...

Farmers’ decisions about how much crop insurance to buy are not generally consistent with either expected profit or utility maximization. They do not pick coverage levels that maximize expected subsidy nor do they demand full insurance coverage. In addition, the absolute size ...

I apply a prospect theory model of risk preferences with an endogenously determined reference point to propose an alternative objective of maximizing expected outcome rather than maximizing expected utility. I show that an agent can always form a consistent expected outcome for any binary gamble and derive a parametric formula, which can then be used to examine the effects of loss aversion, ris...

The American humorist Will Rogers once said: “Insurance is a wonderful thing. It’s the only way the ordinary person can purchase a catastrophe on an instalment plan”. Allowing for the humorous inversion, this quip captures the importance of insurance to people. The basic function of the insurance sector is to take the burden of risk off the shoulders of individual citizens and businesses by ass...

The research question we address is whether state laws that require health insurance policies to provide coverage for specified benefits have affected the size of the population without any private sector health insurance coverage. The laws are often alleged to increase the cost of insurance premiums and thus reduce incentives for smaller employers to offer and for individuals to purchase healt...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) provides tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans on state-run insurance exchanges. Contrary to expectations, many states are refusing or otherwise failing to create such exchanges. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule purports to extend these tax credits and subsidies to the purchase of health insur...

For newcomers to Canada, health care delivery varies from province to province. In New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, newcomers are required to wait 3 months before they can enrol in a provincial health insurance program. Many newcomers purchase private health insurance to ensure health care coverage; however, those in one group of newcomers—refugees—are often unable to purch...

Beginning in 2014, an exchange will be established in each state to help consumers make valid comparisons between plans that are certified to have met benchmarks for quality and affordability. The exchanges will also administer the new health insurance subsidies and facilitate enrollment in private health insurance, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Nobody will be re...