In nahezu allen industrialisierten Ländern besteht der Anspruch, der gesamten Bevölkerung oder zumindest den Mitgliedern der Sozialversicherung alle medizinischen Leistungen zugänglich zu machen, die am Markt verfügbar sind. Dabei müssen die Länder nicht nur Kosten für medizinische...

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...

Why don't people buy annuities? Several explanations have been provided by the previous literature: large fraction of preannuitized wealth in retirees' portfolios; adverse selection; bequest motives; and medical expense uncertainty. This paper uses a quantitative model to assess the importance...

The endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion are robust and well documented results from experimental psychology. They introduce a wedge between the prices at which one is willing to sell or buy a good. The objective of this paper is to address this wedge. We show that the presence...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

This paper examines the role of social learning in household enrollment decisions for the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China by estimating a static game with incomplete information. Using a rich dataset from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we find that the social network...

We study the valuation of unit-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. Instead of solving an optimal stopping problem, we propose a more realistic approach accounting for policyholders’ rationality in exercising their surrender option. The valuation is conducted at the...