In the 1990s, competition among health insurance funds (‘sickness funds’) was introduced in Germany. As one means of competition, free choice of initial health funds and subsequent switching between them was made available to all insured. Since then, the number of funds has decreased...

In den meisten Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern bestehen keine umfas - senden Systeme der sozialen Sicherung. Private Versicherungen sind für einen Großteil der Bevölkerung meist schwer zugänglich oder sehr teuer. Von Risiken sind jedoch alle Menschen betroffen und arme...

In this paper we update the traditional insurance economics framework to incorporate key features of the credit default swap (CDS) market. First, we allow for insurer insolvency, with asymmetric information as to its probability. We find that stable insurers become less stable because they are...

The paper exploits finite mixture (latent class) models to account for consumer heterogeneity in estimating the effect of coinsurance rate on the demand for health care. The parametric analysis employs a two-part model, a Tobit model, and generalized linear models with latent classes. The...

This paper addresses the often neglected question of how macroeconomic risk is shared across and within economies, and identifies reforms that could contribute towards achieving more desirable risksharing outcomes. For risk-sharing across countries, the paper discusses possibilities for...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...

In this note, we generalize the results obtained by Barday and Lesur (2005) by considering a bivariated non separable utility function. We characterize optimal health insurance contracts. Moreover, we show that under moral hazard a sufficiently high risk aversion implies that the optimal...

In this paper, we present an economic model that allows a terminally ill policy-holder to decide whether or not to sell (part of) the policy in the viatical settlement market. The viatical settlement market emerged in the late 1980s in response to the AIDS epidemic. Nowadays it is part of the...

We investigate the valuation and hedging of catastrophe options, whose claim arrival process is modeled by the Cox process or a doubly stochastic Poisson process. Employing the non-arbitrage principle we obtain closed form formula for the pricing of the option. Various hedging parameters are...