Fostering Within-Family Human Capital Investment: An Intragenerational Insurance Perspective of Social Security We develop a general equilibrium stochastic OLG model with heterogenous households. Households differ with respect to their productivity. Productivity depends stochastically on parents' unobservable investment in their child's human capital and an aggregate productivity shock. We intr...

This paper analyzes the investment decisions of insured banks under fixed-rate deposit insurance. The model takes into account the charter value and allows banks to dynamically revise their asset portfolios. Trade-offs exist between preserving the charter and exploiting deposit insurance. The optimal bank portfolio problem is solved analytically for a constant charter value. In any audit period...

• This Issue Brief presents illustrations of how much money a person may need to save to completely pay for health insurance and out-of-pocket health care costs during retirement. The combination of the erosion of retiree health benefits and limited benefits from Medicare and Medigap means that retirees should expect to pay a significant amount of money for health insurance and health care serv...

We study the problem of diversifying a given initial capital over a finite number of investment funds that follow different trading strategies. The investment funds operate in a market where a finite number of underlying assets may be traded over finite discrete time. We present a numerical procedure for finding a diversification that is optimal in the sense of a given convex risk measure. The ...

I develop and estimate a dynamic stochastic optimization model to assess the impact of weather insurance on the consumption, investment, and welfare of farmers in developing countries. Weather insurance has the potential to provide large welfare gains, equivalent to a permanent increase in consumption of almost 17%. Moreover, it can allow for the adoption of riskier but more productive seeds, f...

We analyze the extent to which individuals' choices over five employer-provided insurance coverage decisions and one 401(k) investment decision exhibit systematic patterns, as would be implied by a general utility component of risk preferences. We provide evidence consistent with an important domain-general component that operates across all insurance choices. We find a considerably weaker rela...

Since insuring agricultural products is one of the effective instruments for risk management in agricultural sector, it can reduce risk avoidance among farmers and increase their competence in using production factors and, consequently, increases their inclination towards investment in agricultural sectors. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the factors influencing policyholder...

The theoretical literature suggests that taxation can have a large impact on household portfolio selection and allocation. In this paper we analyze the tax treatment of life insurance, considering the cancellation of tax incentives in Italian life insurance contracts for investors with high marginal tax rates and the introduction of incentives for those with low rates. Using repeated cross-sect...

Assuming the loss aversion framework of Tversky and Kahneman (1992), stochastic investment and labour income processes, and a path-dependent fund target, we show that the optimal investment strategy for defined contribution pension plan members is a target-driven ‘threshold’ strategy, whereby the equity allocation is increased if the accumulating fund is below target and is decreased if it is a...

Many financial products contain prepayment options. Loan contracts are often structured to provide the borrower with the option to prepay the loan at any time, or on specific dates, prior to the maturity date of the loan. These options are important aspects of these financial products. The most commonly encountered investment product with these feature is the mortgage backed security. Investmen...