Abstract Medical bankruptcy was at the heart of the health care reform debate. According to Himmelstein et al. (2009), 62.1 percent of bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were due to medical reasons. At the same time over 15 percent of Americans had no health insurance. The 2010 health...

This paper incorporates recent developments in the literature to quantify the amount of interprovincial risk-sharing in Canada. We find that 29% of shocks to gross provincial product are smoothed by capital markets, 27% are smoothed by the federal tax-transfer systems, and about 24% are smoothed...

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource-scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992--2009 period, the overall...

This paper incorporates recent developments in the literature to quantify the amount of interprovincial risk-sharing in Canada. We find that both capital market and the federal tax-transfer system play an almost equally important role (about 26 percent each) in smoothing shocks to gross...

This paper analyzes capital mobility within Japan based on the consumption-based correlation method developed by Obstfeld (1994). This thoery suggests that consumption in one region is closely related to that in other regions if the capital market is open. We test this theoretical implication in...

Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (BKK 1992) showed that if international capital markets are complete, consumption growth correlations across countries should be higher than their corresponding output growth correlations. In stark contrast to the theory, however, in actual data the consumption growth...

A model is presented to characterise the (optimal) demand for cash balances in deregulated markets. After the model of James Tobin, 1958, net balances are determined in order to maximise the expected return of a certain portfolio combining risk and capital. Unlike the model of Tobin, however,...

An optimal asset allocation is crucial for non-life insurance companies. The most previous studies focused on this topic use a mono-objective technique optimization. This technique usually allows the maximization of shareholders’ expected utility. As non-life insurance company is a complex...

We investigate the effects of regulatory restrictions on the amounts invested in risky asset classes in life insurance funds across EU countries. By estimating a panel data econometric model, we find that these restrictions have an economically and statistically significant negative impact on...

An important question in insurance is the amount of coverage to purchase. A standard microeconomic model for insurance shows that full insurance is optimal. I present a different model where the decision variable is the number of put options and show that full insurance is still optimal, but the...