insure against severe reductions in income of widows by purchasing more life insurance. These findings lead, therefore, to … enough life insurance to prevent a sharp drop in the wife's consumption if her husband dies. This conclusion raises the … question of the role of the government in requiring the purchase of life insurance by couples, through the social security …

least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in data on life-insurance drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finance …. A calibrated version of the model can quantitatively account for the life-cycle variation of insurance observed in the … US data and implies welfare costs of under-insurance for young households that are equivalent to a 4 percent reduction in …

We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. Using the regulatory reporting of historical lapse … risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance … and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in cross-subsidization across …

privately observable, idiosyncratic random events. The information structure precludes conventional insurance arrangements …. However, a financial institution -- perhaps best viewed as a savings bank -- can provide partial insurance by generating a …, resulting in a level of expected utility higher than that achievable in simple security markets. Insurance is incomplete because …

risk insurance, which is manifested in a reduced demand for lines of credit. We also find evidence of a “road show⠅

pushed AIG to the brink of bankruptcy. AIG used securities lending to transform insurance company assets into residential … solvency of the life insurance companies. AIG also sold insurance on multi-sector collateralized debt obligations, backed by …