We construct panel data on house prices and the determined cause of 4.8 million individual fires in the United States between 1986 and 2010 to test whether decreases in local housing market prices coincided with increases in arson. Since some insured homeowners may attempt to disguise the actual...

Prior research provides theoretical insight on factors likely to impact the decision to mitigate such as the degree of risk aversion, the cost of market insurance, and the cost of self insurance. We provide empirical evidence related to several hypotheses from the self insurance literature on...

We study optimal insurance, consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where a family purchases life insurance to protect the loss of the wage earner's human capital. Explicit solutions are obtained by employing CARA utility functions. We show that the optimal life insurance purchase is not...

Lawsuits alleging illegal and unethical insurance sales practices have received widespread publicity in recent years. Although many observers have argued that one source of ethical conflicts for insurance agents is the industry's reliance on straight commission compensation, there remains a...

The importance of managerial decisions related to interest-sensitive cash flows has received considerable attention in insurance literature. Consistent with the interest-sensitive nature of insurer assets and liabilities, empirical research has shown that insurer insolvency is significantly...

The growing concern over market conduct issues in the life insurance industry necessitates adequate disclosure of important factors in the generation of life insurance surrender values. Although Chung and Skipper (1987) show that credited interest rates are significantly positively correlated...

This study extends previous research on life insurer insolvency by providing empirical evidence on a large (nonmatched-pair) sample of insurers based on three alternative types of statistical models. The study utilizes 1986 through 1990 data for a sample of insurers that did or did not become...

Prior research suggests that the occurrence of a catastrophe may lead to increases in risk mitigation, risk perception, and the demand for insurance. Given the extensive damage inflicted by major natural disasters, such a phenomenon is intuitive for property risk. However, the literature...