Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

It is well known that private information can impair the functioning of insurance markets,and widely documented that individuals misperceive their private information. But these twofacts are rarely analyzed jointly. I use panel data from a survey of the elderly that collectssubjective mortality...

The endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion are robust and well documented results from experimental psychology. They introduce a wedge between the prices at which one is willing to sell or buy a good. The objective of this paper is to address this wedge. We show that the presence...