Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

This paper questions how heterogeneity of beliefs about the probability of loss affects equilibrium insurance contracts, firm behavior, and welfare focusing especially on the effect of optimism when a monotonicity property, which is a major assumption of prior work, is violated. This paper shows...

It is well known that private information can impair the functioning of insurance markets,and widely documented that individuals misperceive their private information. But these twofacts are rarely analyzed jointly. I use panel data from a survey of the elderly that collectssubjective mortality...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...