This paper provide a large-deviations approximation of the tail distribution of total financial losses on a portfolio consisting of many positions. Applications include the total default losses on a bank portfolio, or the total claims against an insurer. The results may be useful in allocating...

While the Sharpe ratio is still the dominant measure for ranking risky assets, a substantial effort has been made over the past three decades to find a way to account for non-Normally distributed risks. This paper derives a generalized ranking measure which, under a regularity condition,...

One criticism of the estate tax is that it prevents the owners of family businesses from passing their enterprises to their children. The problem is that it may be difficult to pay estate taxes without liquidating the business. A natural question is why individuals with such concerns do not...

In the presence of uncertain lifetimes, social security has the characteristics of an annuity: a consumer pays a tax when young in exchange for receiving a social security benefit if he survives to be old. If consumers have identical ex ante mortality probabilities, then a fully funded social...

In this paper, we argue that actuarial valuation of annuity benefit streams is theoretically inconsistent with the assumption of pure lifecycle motives. Instead, we show that the simple discounted value of future benefits (ignoring the possibility of death) is often a good approximation to the...

This is the first paper to document the effect of health on the migration propensities of African Americans in the American past. Using both IPUMS and the Colored Troops Sample of the Civil War Union Army Data, I estimate the effects of literacy and health on the migration propensities of...

This paper presents a calculation of the time series of the after-tax rate of return to whole life insurancy. When compared to the after-tax return on an alternative portfolio of similar risk, more than 60%of the decline in life insurance savings (suitably defined) in the past two decades can be...

This paper evaluates the extent of adverse selection in life insurance and annuities in international markets, for both group and individual products. We also compare results with prior analyses of adverse selection in international annuity markets, focusing on the US, the UK, and Japan. Our...