The employer-sponsored life insurance (ESLI) market is particularly susceptible to adverse selection due to community-rated premiums, guaranteed issue coverage, and the existence of a well-functioning individual market as a substitute. Using administrative payroll and healthcare claims data from...

The profitability of life insurance offerings is contingent on accurate projections and pricing of mortality risk. The COVID-19 pandemic created significant uncertainty, with dire mortality predictions from early forecasts resulting in widespread government intervention and greater individual...

We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with human capital risk, age-dependent...

Microinsurance is an emerging concept protecting households from the potentially catastrophic expenditures associated with family related shocks. Therefore, this paper presents evidence on the determinants of insurance participation using probit models on household survey data from Sri Lanka,...

This paper derives the conditions under which fitness-reducing alleles can survive in a longrun stationary equilibrium for a trading population, extending the results in Saint-Paul (2002) for arbitrary systems of sexual reproduction

This paper develops a model in which market structure is determined endogenously by the choice of intermediation mode. We consider two representative business modes of intermediation that are widely used in real-life markets: one is a middleman mode where an intermediary holds inventories which...

The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic,...

The assumption that household income is strongly and positively correlated with a household's real standard of living provides the basis for the joint taxation of families, which has the effect of discriminating against married women as second earners. This paper shows, in the context of a model...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a...