Although financial pricing models imply that profits of property- liability insurance firms should conform to an unpredictable time series process, cycles are widely reported. Some controversy exists as to whether the "underwriting cycle" is a mere accounting artifact or whether it has real...

A number of articles have documented that the classical event study methodology exhibits a bias toward detecting "effects", irrespective of whether such effects actually exist. This paper addresses this bias by presenting a new methodology that explicitly incorporates stochastic behaviors of the...

We characterize the classes of utility functions that are consistent with different notions of mean preserving spreads introduced in the literature. This gives rise to a unified approach and extension of some definitions of increasing risk, including the concepts of Rothschild and Stiglitz...

We extend the characterizations of increasing risks developed by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) to the case of unbounded probability distributions. We also consider the related notion of increasing risk about $\nu$ introduced by Landsberger and Meilijson (1990). Moreover, for some of the results...

Decisions about how to use an individual's age are particularly important under the Oregon Health Plan's pending employer mandate. This article summarizes the relationships between age and other important variables that impact health policy decisions, including a review of the legality of using...