Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

We model EU countries’ bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether “old” and “new” EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether “new” ones are assigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than...