Has macroeconomic management succeeded in making privatization promote growth in Africa? What are the probable strategies that should accompany the privatization reform process to promote growth in Africa? To what extent has the privatization process succeeded in attracting foreign direct...

Our study analyses the extent of integration of the EU market for life and non-life insurance. The main integration indicator used is the market share (premium based) of foreign companies in domestic markets. For the calculation of this indicator, three different kinds of foreign presence are...

We evaluate the extent to which there are racial disparities in life insurance coverage using multiple years of the Survey of Income and Program Participation between 2001 and 2010. We find that African-Americans hold significantly more life insurance after controlling for other factors,...

Certain commodity producers face uncertain output and price, but can trade financial derivatives on price. I consider how best to use a put option on price. I introduce the variance surface, which is a data visualization technique that shows the level of variance across a grid of values for the...

Consider an agent who holds a stock, but is allowed to buy and hold some quantity of at-the-money put options on the stock. Such an agent must decide the optimal use of financial derivatives under trade restrictions. This paper uses simulation to compare the optimal quantity when the agent...

This paper provides empirical evidence of advantageous selection in insurance markets. By using a novel insurance setting where moral hazard is not a concern, I am able to overcome an important obstacle in most studies of selection: the inability to distinguish moral hazard from selection. In...

Taking advantage of a natural experiment and a rich household-level panel dataset, this paper tests the impact of an agricultural insurance program on household level production, borrowing, and saving. The empirical strategy includes both difference-in-difference and triple difference...

Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on weather insurance adoption and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. To quantify network effects, the experiment offers intensive information sessions about the...

The study supports Government efforts to introduce reforms to the insurance industry and its negotiations for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It provides a consolidated perspective about insurance services in Laos, with particular reference to the impact of possible Government...

In the classical Arrow-Borch-Raviv problem of demand for insurance contracts, it is well-known that the optimal insurance contract for an insurance buyer – or decision maker (DM) – is a deductible contract, when the insurer is a risk-neutral Expected-Utility (EU) maximizer, and when the DM...