Showing 1 - 10 of 71
This paper assesses whether insurers' state taxes reduce purchases of property-casualty coverage. Tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer-level data from publicly-available, annual accounting reports for 1993, 1994, and 1995. A positive relation between self-insurance and state...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471330
Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012599359
Insurers are the largest institutional investors of corporate bonds. However, a standard theory of insurance markets, in which insurers maximize firm value subject to regulatory or risk constraints, predicts no allocation to corporate bonds. We resolve this puzzle in an equilibrium asset pricing...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012814454
This paper studies the economic role of financial institutions in economies where agents' incomes are subject to privately observable, idiosyncratic random events. The information structure precludes conventional insurance arrangements. However, a financial institution -- perhaps best viewed as...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477783
This paper derives the value of PBGC pension insurance under two scenarios of interest. The first allows for voluntary plan termination, which appears to be legal under current statutes. In the second scenario, termination is prohibited unless the firm is bankrupt. Optimal pension funding...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477882
This paper elaborates equilibrium properties of contract labor markets when cost barriers limit labor mobility in response to demand and productivity shifts. Unemployment is sustained because the marginal value of labor is not equated across all firms; however the equilibrium contract optimally...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012478007
Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480029
We show that a calibrated life-cycle two-earner household model with endogenous labor supply can rationalize the extent of consumption insurance against shocks to male and female wages, as estimated empirically by Blundell, Pistaferri and Saporta-Eksten (2016) in U.S. data. In the model, 35% of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480409
Two intermediary-based factors - a broad financial distress measure and a dealer corporate bond inventory measure - explain about 50% of the puzzling common variation of credit spread changes beyond canonical structural factors. A simple model, in which intermediaries facing margin constraints...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480437
Can measured risk attitudes and associated structural models predict insurance demand? In an experiment (n = 1,730), we elicit measures of utility curvature, probability weighting, loss aversion, and preference for certainty and use them to parameterize seventeen common structural models (e.g.,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480452