insure against severe reductions in income of widows by purchasing more life insurance. These findings lead, therefore, to … enough life insurance to prevent a sharp drop in the wife's consumption if her husband dies. This conclusion raises the … question of the role of the government in requiring the purchase of life insurance by couples, through the social security …

least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in data on life-insurance drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finance …. A calibrated version of the model can quantitatively account for the life-cycle variation of insurance observed in the … US data and implies welfare costs of under-insurance for young households that are equivalent to a 4 percent reduction in …

We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. Using the regulatory reporting of historical lapse … risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance … and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in cross-subsidization across …

This study examines the adequacy of life insurance among married American couples approaching retirement. It improves … matched Social Security earnings histories). Second, it employs new financial planning software to evaluate the life insurance … insurance holdings. Among some groups, the frequency of underinsurance exceeds two-thirds, and the frequency of severe …

question is why individuals with such concerns do not purchase enough life insurance to meet their estate tax liabilities. This … paper examines whether and how people use life insurance to deal with the estate tax. We find that, other things being the … same, business owners purchase more life insurance than other individuals. However, on the margin, their insurance …

The conventional approach to retirement and life insurance planning, which is used throughout the financial planning … determines the amounts of saving and life insurance needed to achieve these targets. The economic approach is based on the life … insurance recommendations provided by economic financial planning software and the practical application of traditional …

life insurance to offset mandatory annuitization by the existing Social Security system. Using new data on elderly … households, this study is able to examine ownership of pure term life insurance separately from whole life, or cash …-value, policies. This is an important distinction in the Annuity Offset Model' because the central implication is that term insurance …

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry … hedging. Post reform impacted firms have lower risk and fewer negative income shocks. Product market competition is also …