It is well-documented that Blacks have a significantly lower amount of wealth than Whites, which carries a variety of implications. Although there are many historical reasons for the wealth gap that are not easily solved, positive financial behaviors can help Blacks strengthen their financial...

The life insurance sector is exposed to systematic liquidity risk, because policyholders would have a common incentive to surrender their policies in the event of a severe macroeconomic shock. Life insurers would, then, have to sell assets, and these fire sales would amplify the original shock....

Participating life insurance contracts allow the policyholder to participate in the annual return of a reference portfolio. Additionally, they are often equipped with an annual (cliquet-style) return guarantee. The current low interest rate environment has again refreshed the discussion on risk...

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...

Motivated by a recent demographic study establishing a link between macroeconomic fluctuations and the mortality index kt in the Lee-Carter model, we develop a dynamic asset-liability model to assess the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the solvency of a life insurance company....

Traditional life insurance policies offer no equity investment opportunities for the premium paid, and suffer from low returns over the long insurance terms. Modern equity-linked insurance policies offer equity investment opportunities exposed to equity market risk. To combine the low-risk of...

Life insurance premiums display significant rigidity in the data, on average adjusting once every 3 years by more than 10%. This contrasts with the underlying marginal cost which exhibits considerable volatility due to the movements in interest and mortality rates. We build a model where...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model is used to provide valuable information on investment efficiency of private life insurance industry in India. This study utilizes two inputs (shareholders' investments and policyholders' investments) and two outputs (net returns on investments to the...

By applying the principle of equivalent forward preferences, this paper revisits the pricing and hedging problems for equity-linked life insurance contracts. The equity-linked contingent claim depends on, not only the future lifetime of the policyholder, but also the performance of the reference...

I find that life insurers with bank affiliates had higher premium growth rates than did other life insurers in 2008. The higher growth is derived mainly from annuity products (deposit-type insurance products), which are often viewed as substitutes for bank certificates of deposit (CDs). The...