We develop a new dataset to study homeowners insurance. Our data on over 47 million observations of households' property insurance expenditures from 2014-2023 are inferred from mortgage escrow payments. First, we find a sharp 33% increase in average premiums from 2020 to 2023 (13% in real terms)...

As climate risk escalates, property insurance is critical to reduce the risk exposure of households and firms and to aid recovery when disasters strike. To perform these functions efficiently, insurers need to access high quality information about disaster risk and set prices that accurately...

We study the sensitivity of optimal consumption streams with respect to perturbations of the random endowment. At the leading order, the consumption adjustment does not matter: any choice that matches the budget constraint simply shifts the original utility by the marginal value of the...

Using administrative panel data from Norway, we investigate the development of household labor income, financial wealth and asset holdings over a nine-year period surrounding job loss. Consistent with a simple theoretical model, the data show precautionary saving and a shift toward safer assets...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This paper characterizes the transition dynamics of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households face idiosyncratic income risk and cannot commit to repay their debt. Therefore, even though a full set of contingent claims that pay out...

This paper uses a novel numerical optimization technique – robust optimization – that is well suited to solving the asset-liability management (ALM) problem for pension schemes. It requires the estimation of fewer stochastic parameters, reduces estimation risk and adopts a prudent approach...

We discuss risk measures representing the minimum amount of capital a financial institution needs to raise and invest in a pre-specified eligible asset to ensure it is adequately capitalized. Most of the literature has focused on cash-additive risk measures, for which the eligible asset is a...

We study capital requirements for bounded financial positions defined as the minimum amount of capital to invest in a chosen eligible asset targeting a pre-specified acceptability test. We allow for general acceptance sets and general eligible assets, including defaultable bonds. Since the...

This chapter is concerned with the distribution of personal wealth, which usually refers to the material assets that can be sold in the marketpace, although on occasion pension rights are also included. We summarise the available evidence on wealth distribution for a number of countries. This...