balance sheet behavior of a large class of intermediaries, life insurance companies. The pass-through from assets to equity is …

behavior? To test this, we examine the impact of FSB collapse on life insurance-holding, an accessible alternative savings … vehicle over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We document a sharp and persistent increase in insurance demand in …

immunotherapy for melanoma patients. Extrapolating to 17 other cancer sites, we estimate the insurance sector's benefit to equal $6 …We estimate the potential gains of life-extending treatments to life insurance companies and apply it to immunotherapy …. These treatments promise to dramatically raise durable survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients but are often …

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 …

market. We show that insurance companies, the largest institutional holders of corporate bonds, reach for yield in choosing … their investments. Consistent with lower rated bonds bearing higher capital requirement, insurance firms' prefer to hold … higher rated bonds. However, conditional on credit ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher …

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 …