Standard theories of insurance, dating from Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), stress the role of adverse selection in explaining the decision to purchase insurance. In these models, higher risk people buy full or near-full insurance, while lower risk people buy less complete coverage, if they buy...

We study optimal investment in self-protection of insured individuals when they face interdependencies in the form of potential contamination from others. If individuals cannot coordinate their actions, then the positive externality of investing in self-protection implies that, in equilibrium,...

This paper views abortion access as an insurance policy that protects women from unwanted pregnancies. Within this framework, we present a theoretical model where greater access provides value in the form of insurance against unwanted births and also reduces the incentive to avoid pregnancy....

State guaranty funds are quasi-governmental agencies that provide insurance to policyholders against the risk of insurance company failure. But insurance provided by guaranty funds, like all insurance, creates moral hazard problems, especially for companies that are insolvent or near-insolvent....

Home equity insurance policies, policies insuring homeowners against declines in the price of their homes, would bear some resemblance both to ordinary insurance and to financial hedging vehicles. A menu of choices for the design of such policies is presented here, and conceptual issues are...

The problem of establishing the amount of losses covered by public and private insurance is often characterized by asymmetric information, in which the claimant already knows the extent of a loss but this can be demonstrated to the insurer only at a cost. It is shown that a simple arrangement,...

Are individuals effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth by either formal or informal mechanisms? This paper shows that under perfect insurance, marginal utility should grow at the same rate for all consumers, and that the distribution of measured consumption growth...

The theory of insurance is considered here when an insured individual may be able to sue another party for the losses that the insured suffered--and thus when an insured has a potential source of compensation in addition to insurance coverage. Insurance policies reflect this possibility through...

We use a large data set of deductible choices in auto insurance contracts to estimate the distribution of risk preferences in our sample. To do so, we develop a structural econometric model, which accounts for adverse selection by allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in both risk (probability...

We examine whether unregulated, private insurance markets efficiently provide insurance against reclassification risk (the risk of becoming a bad risk and facing higher premiums). To do so, we examine the ex-post risk type of individuals who drop their long-term care insurance contracts relative...