In the current debate on the reasons and implications of the Greek and Irish euro crisis, the intra-European current account imbalances have gained rising attention. Whereas Greece and Ireland struggle for austerity in private and public spending, Germany is urged to reduce its current account...

This study uncovers a cross-border financial diversification motive related to goods and services trade. Using the IMF CPIS panel data set for a broad set of country pairs and for the period 2001-2012, I find empirical evidence that the share of equity in a bilateral portfolio decreases with...

The nine largest countries in the Euro area have surprisingly different degrees of wealth inequality. At the same time, there is a strong negative correlation between wealth inequality and homeownership rates across countries. To account for this fact, we first analyze decompositions of the Gini...

This paper explores the impacts of traditional agricultural insurance that offers protection against climatic shocks on small-scale tobacco farmers in Colombia after a period of substantial crop failures. Our identi cation strategy bene ts from a natural experimental setup of the form in which...

Insurance contract nonperformance relates to situations when valid claims are not paid by the insurer. We extend probabilistic insurance models to allow for such nonperformance risk as well as ambiguity regarding nonperformance and loss probabilities. We empirically test theoretical predictions...

In the paper we analyze the economic, social, cultural, institutional and political factors that determine regional demand for services like "insurance". As economic factors, we analyze the impact of non-governmental credit over the insurance market. Development of an econometric model is based...

Common economic models of insurance theory assume that insurers play no role in modifying the loss potential. Individual loss prevention decisions tend to reduce risk and even often affect risk faced by others. Incorporating these important features into an insurance market, we argue that...

This paper investigates the impact of insurance contract design on the behavior of filing fraudulent claims in an experimental setup. We test whether or not peoples' fraud behavior varies for insurance contracts with full coverage, a straight deductible or variable premiums (bonus-malus...

We develop an insurance market model where consumers (i) exhibit present-biased preferences, and (ii) suffer from physical pain in case of (health-) damage. They can exert preventive effort to reduce the probability of damage. Sophisticated consumers correctly anticipate their effort and...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...