States levy insurance premium taxes, which are essentially gross receipt taxes on premiums. A very unusual characteristic of insurance premium taxes is that in each state in which an insurance company writes premiums, the firm pays the higher of the tax rate in the state in which the company is...

This paper studies the effects of company risk and guaranty funds on life insurance in force using company-by-state level data during the 1985-2010 period. Our primary objective is to use the variation in the timing of guaranty fund adoptions across states to identify the impact of public...

There is a conflict between the philosophies of United States (US) style capital regulation and that of the European Union (EU). While the conflict looks like it will not evolve into a real trade issue, there is a potential for misunderstanding of the pros and cons of the two systems. This paper...

This paper provides a detailed description of a new measure of reserve error, the Full Information Reserve Error (FIRE), which was first proposed by Grace and Leverty (2018). We briefly describe the philosophy of FIRE and its advantages. We then present the details on how to calculate it. We...

This paper studies the impact of lenders’ sensitivity to company risk on the extent of market discipline in life insurance during the 1985-2010 period. We find strong market discipline for young insurers but not for older insurers, supporting the strong influence of lenders’ trust attached...

This paper examines the impact of health insurance expansion on medical liability costs using the case of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion has increased the demand for medical services, but in doing so it may also have increased physicians' liability in...

The rising cost and diminishing availability of homeowners insurance have become a hot topic in many parts of the country. A number of factors have been blamed for causing the adverse price and availability trends, with insurers and consumer groups offering differing opinions on the causes....

The purpose of this briefing paper is to assess the implications of natural disasters for the supply of home insurance. We focus on the risk of hurricanes and earthquakes. Our analysis begins with a review of the challenges that catastrophes pose for the insurance mechanism and how insurers seek...

The U.S. insurance industry is primarily regulated by the states. This is in contrast to the regulatory structure for other financial intermediaries which have a federal regulator. Banks, for example, may choose to be regulated by either the federal government or by the states. Recent...

Using the Survey of Consumer Finances we examine the life cycle demand for different types of life insurance. Specifically we test for the consumer's aversion to income volatility resulting from the death of a household's wage-earner through the purchase of life insurance. We first develop a...