exposure. We develop an equilibrium model of insurance markets in which financial frictions and market power are important …

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry …

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 … insurance markets, in many others, it is the lower risk individuals who have more insurance coverage. If the standard model is …

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 …

One unusual feature of the U.S. property-casualty insurance industry is the coexistence of stock and mutual companies … insurance companies respond to differences in their underwriting environment. Agency theories suggest that the stock company may …' performance, by state and by line, in eight different lines of insurance. Stock companies are more likely than mutuals to reduce …