We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security - which is immune to adverse selection - affects...

Telemonitoring devices can be used to screen consumers' characteristics and mitigate information asymmetries that lead to adverse selection in insurance markets. However, some consumers value their privacy and dislike sharing private information with insurers. In the second-best efficient...

We use data from a large US life expectancy provider to test for asymmetric information in the secondary life insurance-or life settlements-market. We compare realized lifetimes for a subsample of settled policies relative to all (settled and nonsettled) policies, and find a positive...

Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...

Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security — which is immune to adverse selection — affects...