We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

We investigate the optimal regulation of financial conglomerates which combine a bank and a non-bank financial institution. The conglomerate’s risk-taking incentives depend upon the level of market discipline it faces, which in turn is determined by the conglomerate’s liability...

Risk-averse individuals wish that assets concentrate their payoffs in states of high marginal value (that is, highly likely or low endowment states). An asset or portfolio may fail to do so, by having payoffs uncorrelated to its owner needs or, even worse, by having them inversely related. The...

We consider successive generations of non-altruistic individuals carrying a good or bad gene. Daughters are more likely to carry their mother's gene than the opposite one. Competitive insurers can perform a genetic test revealing an agent's gene. They may condition their quotes on the agent's or...

The management of a life insurance portfolio or pension fund must take intoaccount the temporal evolution of its liabilities and its assets through some variables:the factors and returns. Their behaviour is analysed statistically and we deduce it to avector error correction model (VECM). Using...

Life annuities provide a guaranteed income for the remainder of the recipient’s lifetime, and therefore, annuitization presents an important option when choosing an adequate investment strategy for the retirement ages. While there are numerous research articles studying annuities from a...

In 2003, Swiss Re introduced a mortality-based security designed to hedge excessive mortality changes for its life book of business. The concern was apparently brevity risk, i.e., the risk of premature death. The brevity risk due to a pandemic is similar to the property risk associated with...

The continuing trend of increasing frequency and severity of losses from natural and man-made-catastrophes during the last decades has drawn attention to catastrophe risk management. Considering the loss potential of catastrophic events, the private insurance markets' capacity does not seem to...

This paper studies the role of institutional investors (pension fund, insurance companies and investment companies) in the development of the financial sector and economic growth in OECD countries by employing a dynamic panel VAR. While pervious studies in this area have mainly focused on...

The paper studies property insurance in Britain. It emphasises the following points. In the case of terrorism insurance the government decided to provide cost free stop loss insurance, to prevent the market from breaking down. When the country was hit by subsidence damages, the premiums and...