Efforts to raise US health-care productivity have proceeded slowly, potentially due the fragmentation of payment across insurers. Each insurer’s efforts improve care could influence how doctors practice for other insurers, leading unvalued externalities. We study a randomized letter intervention by Medicare curtail overuse antipsychotics. The letters did not mention private insurance but reduce...

The surrender option embedded in many life insurance products is a clause that allows policyholders to terminate the contract early. Pricing techniques based on the American Contingent Claim (ACC) theory are often used, though the actual policyholders’ behavior is far from optimal. Inspired by many prepayment models for mortgage backed securities, this paper builds a Rational Expectation (RE) m...

Life settlements provide the possibility for individuals to convert their life insurance policies into cash in a secondary market transaction. Hence, this additional option is welcome from the current policyholders’ point of view, but the reasons for the attractiveness to financial investors as well as the equilibrium impacts on life insurers and future policyholders are not immediate clear. Th...

Funeral insurance has existed at least since antiquity, and it remains popular in many parts of Africa today. Yet the study of funeral insurance as a distinct form of insurance has hitherto been neglected. This paper presents a model in which funeral insurance combines regular life insurance with a restriction on how the payout is spent. The model predicts that there is an intermediate range of...

We examine equilibria in competitive insurance markets when individuals take unobservable labor supply decisions. Precautionary labor motives introduce countervailing incentives in the insurance market, and equilibria with positive profits can occur even in the standard case in which individuals exogenously differ in risk only. We then extend the model to allow for both privately known risks an...

We present the regression-based Monte Carlo simulation algorithms for solving the stochastic control models associated with pricing and hedging of the Guaranteed Lifelong Withdrawal Benefit (GLWB) in variable annuities, where the dynamics of the underlying fund value is assumed to evolve according to the stochastic volatility model. The GLWB offers a lifelong withdrawal benefit even when the po...

This study extends the dynamic conditional correlation model to allow day-specific correlations of shocks across international stock markets. The properties of the resulting periodic dynamic conditional correlation (PDCC) model are examined, with the model then applied to study the intra-week interactions between six developed European stock markets and the US over the period 1993 2005. We find...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for prescription drugs. This natural experiment allows identifi cation of the causal impact of the program on self-...

This paper examines the stock market impact of captive insurance subsidiary formation on parent companies in the United Kingdom (UK) corporate sector. We report that the formation of an insurance captive has no e€ect on the ®nancial, systematic and unsystematic risks of the parent company, irrespective of the parent's market capitalisation. In addition, there is weak evidence that the market ha...

Prior work suggests that heterogeneous information or weak incentives for solvency could have caused some general liability insurers to charge low ex ante prices during the early 1980s and mid-to-late 1990s, putting downward pressure on other firms’ prices and plausibly aggravating subsequent periods of rapid premium growth. We analyse whether the 1994–1999 ‘‘soft’’ market in medical malpractic...