Entry into licensed professions requires meeting competency requirements, typ- ically assessed through licensing examinations. This paper explores whether the number of individuals attempting to enter a profession (potential supply) affects the difficulty of the entry examination. The empirical...

In this study, we analyze the career profiles of Italian politicians in the post-war period. Using a unique, newly collected data set that contains detailed information on all the politicians who have been elected to the Italian Parliament between 1948 and 2008, we address a number of important...

The paper studies two games of capacity manipulation in hospital-intern markets. The focus is on the stability of Nash equilibrium outcomes. We provide minimal necessary and sufficient conditions guaranteeing the existence of pure strategy Nash Equilibria and the stability of outcomes.

This paper provides the static, swap-based hedge for an annuity, and compares it with the dynamic, delta-based hedge, achieved using longevity bonds. We assume that the longevity intensity is distributed according to a CIR-type process and provide closed-form derivatives prices and hedges, also...

We solve a mean-variance optimisation problem of a defined contribution pension scheme in the accumulation phase. The financial market consists of: (i) the risk-free asset, (ii) a risky asset following a GBM, and (iii) a bond driven by a stochastic interest rate following the Vasicek [1977]...

This paper provides a closed-form Value-at-Risk (VaR) for the net exposure of an annuity provider, taking into account both mortality and interest-rate risk, on both assets and liabilities. It builds a classical risk- return frontier and shows that hedging strategies - such as the transfer of...

The dramatic rise in the disability insurance (DI) roles in the last 20 years has been the subject of much controversy in both popular and academic circles. While, the relationship between DI and labor force participation has been the subject of a growing literature, the mechanism of this...

In this paper we use doubly stochastic processes (or Cox processes) in order to model the random evolution of mortality of an individual. These processes have been widely used in the credit risk literature in modelling default arrival, and in this context have proved to be quite flexible,...

Stochastic mortality, i.e. modelling death arrival via a jump process with stochastic intensity, is gaining increasing reputation as a way to rep- resent mortality risk. This paper represents a .rst attempt to model the mortality risk of couples of individuals, according to the stochastic inten-...

The paper provides natural hedging strategies among death benefits and annuities written on a single and on different generations. It obtains closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges, in the presence of both longevity and interest rate risk. We present an application to UK data on survivorship and...