The future course of old-age mortality is of great importance to public sector expenditures in countries where old-age programs, such as Social Security and Medicare in the US, account for large fractions of the public budget. This paper argues that the competitive market prices of motality...

This paper uses direct evidence on the self-perceived and actual mortality risk of individuals, as well as the price and quantity of their life insurance, to evaluate whether asymmetric information is a barrier to trade in insurace markets.

This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortality contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life-insurance...

It is well known that modern governments are unwilling to use poll taxes because it corresponds to political suicide. Still, poll taxes are allegedly the most efficient form of taxation. Building on Eaton and Rosen (1980) and Peck (1989), the goal of this paper is to show a case where an excise...

The goal of this study is to develop a tool to aid insurance company adjusters in their decision making and to ensure that they are better equipped to fight fraud.

In this survey we present some of the more significant results in the literature on adverse selection in insurance markets. Sections 1 and 2 introduce the subject and section 3 discusses the monopoly model developed by Stiglitz (1977) for the case of single-period contracts and extended by many...

This article follows a previous study on insurance fraud in the Quebec automobile insurance industry (Dionne and Belhadji, 1996). Results from that research showed that 3 to 6,4% of all claim payments (excluding those for "glass damage only") contained fraud, representing 28 to 61 million...

We discuss the difficult question of measuring the effects of asymmetric information problems on resource allocation. Two of them are retained: moral hazard and adverse selection.

This paper tests the efficiency associated with the role of memory in long-term contracting. Bonus-malus schemes in automobile insurance are examples of contracts that use memory. During the eighties different contributors (Lambert, 1983, Rogerson, 1985, Boyer, and Dionne, 1989) showed how...

We discuss how to detect the informational content of household decisions among the explanatory variables of econometric models. Some applications to the choice of automobile insurance contracts and to the demand for life insurance are provided. We show that the information provided by...