Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk-taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk-prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...

This paper examines the structure of optimal insurance contracts for a broad class of insureds that includes both risk averters and risk lovers and by assuming that the insureds are prudent. We specify the difference in optimal contract form between risk averters and risk lovers. Treating these...

The potential dark side of government guarantees, introduced to mitigate concerns about financial stability during economic downturns, is that they may create incentives for excessive risk-taking. In a low-interest rate environment, this effect maybe even stronger as financial institutions try...

This paper explores the impact of capital adequacy requirements on the investment behavior of insurance companies from a new perspective. We specifically investigate one important feature of Risk-Based Capital (RBC) system, the square root rule in aggregating risk categories. We show that the...

We leverage the assumption that preferences are stable across contexts to par- tially identify and conduct inference on the parameters of a structural model of risky choice. Working with data on households’ deductible choices across three lines of insurance coverage and a model that nests...

An analysis of the effects of natural hazards on society does not solely depend on a region's topographic or climatic exposure to natural processes, but the region's institutional resilience to natural processes that ultimately determines whether natural processes result in a natural hazard or...

We use data on households' deductible choices in auto and home insurance to estimate a structural model of risky choice that incorporates "standard" risk aversion (concave utility over final wealth), loss aversion, and nonlinear probability weighting. Our estimates indicate that nonlinear...

We use data on insurance deductible choices to estimate a structural model of risky choice that incorporates "standard" risk aversion (diminishing marginal utility for wealth) and probability distortions. We find that probability distortions - characterized by substantial overweighting of small...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in...