There is a growing sense of crisis associated with the cost of health care services as reflected in rapidly increasing insurance premiums, larger out of pocket expenditures for consumers, and expanding shortfalls in the State's budget. The impact of this crisis has included a reduction in the number of insurance companies providing health insurance in Maine, an increase in the number of busines...

We study the existence of self-selection and moral hazard in the Chilean health insurance industry. Dependent workers must purchase health insurance either from one public or several private insurance providers. For them, we analyze the relationship between health care services utilization and the choice of either private or public insurance. In the case of independent workers, where there is n...

Recent events involving major insurance companies and insurance brokerage firms highlight substantial incentive problems in commercial and reinsurance markets where intermediation takes place. We show that in markets with informed as well as uninformed consumers and heterogeneous risk profiles intermediation has the potential to improve social welfare. However, since intermediation reduces insu...

In Absolute or Relative Terms?How Framing Prices Affects the Consumer Price Sensitivity ofHealth Plan Choice This paper provides field evidence on (a) how price framing affects consumers’ decision toswitch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurancecan be influenced by policymakers through simple regulatory efforts. In 2009, in order to...

We propose two models to analyze welfare-maximizing capital requirements for insurance companies considering that capital is costly and therefore affecting the premium. Within a continuous-time model, we derive insurance demand and welfare as a function of personal wealth, the insurance company’s wealth, and the claims process, and compare them to their counterparts in a static model. Besides d...

This paper provides fi eld evidence on (a) how price framing aff ects consumers’ decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be infl uenced by policymakers through simple regulatory eff orts. In 2009, in order to foster competition among health insurance companies, German federal regulation required health insurance companies to ...

With China’s imminent entry into the World Trade Organization, the deregulation of the Japanese insurance market, and the liberalization of Indian insurance regulations, Asia is poised to become a major insurance magnet over the next decade. Foreign companies able to capitalize on the recent increased openness of the Asian markets stand to reap substantial profits. However, companies entering t...

A principal difficulty in insuring catastrophic risks is the insufficiency of disaggregated historical data on the catastrophe losses. The lack of data and complex spatial and dynamic interdependencies between catastrophic events imply the necessity to base the insurance of property against natural hazards on catastrophe modeling. The purpose of this research is to develop a working tool for in...