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 …

of health insurance. We show that any innovation worth buying reduces overall risk, thereby generating positive insurance …Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial … risk. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of …

in global risks to human life. The response to this will be the seeking-out of financial innovation by major forms …, primarily in the area of insurance, but also in the diversification of asset holdings. We suggest in this paper that, with … modest climate changes of 1-2 degrees C, the global insurance market will expand dramatically. However, under more extreme …

We analyze the role of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase the cost of … insurance by enabling insurers to set price above marginal cost, and by creating incentives for inefficiently high levels of … insurance turnover. Our empirical analysis indicates that frictions increase prices enough to transfer 13.2% of consumer surplus …

This paper examines the standard test for asymmetric information in insurance markets: that its presence will result in … a positive correlation between insurance coverage and risk occurrence. We show empirically that while there is no … evidence of this positive correlation in the long-term care insurance market, asymmetric information still exists. We use …

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets. We use a unique data set …, consisting of all annuity policies sold by a large U.K. insurance company since the early 1980s, to analyze mortality differences … asymmetric information in insurance markets. We find no evidence of mortality differences, however, across annuities of different …

nondiversifiable human capital investment. In the absence of complete insurance markets for human capital, the decentralized … efficient reallocation and full insurance when human capital is mobile at some cost, due to the endogeneity of the initial …

Insurance markets often feature consumer sorting along both an extensive margin (whether to buy) and an intensive …

The willingness to pay for insurance captures the value of insurance against only the risk that remains when choices … are observed. This paper develops tools to measure the ex-ante expected utility impact of insurance subsidies and mandates … existing willingness to pay and cost curve estimates from the low-income health insurance exchange in Massachusetts. Ex …