In crop insurance design, the yield guarantee and the premium are very important parameters, both of which depend upon the yield distribution. Accordingly, the accurate modeling of yield distribution is essential for designing crop insurance contracts. This study employs historical county-level yield data for irrigated and dry wheat in East Azarbaijan Province, Iran for 1975-2013 to evaluate th...

CONTEXT There is concern in both the medical community and the general public about mechanisms of medical decision making and the interplay of physician and insurer decisions in determining access to care. OBJECTIVE To examine the medical process influencing access to growth hormone (GH) therapy for childhood short stature by comparing coverage policies of US insurers with the treatment recom...

We develop the first integrated analytical framework to study contract and pricing strategies in the pharmaceutical industry. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to analyze optimal contract and pricing decisions for insurers and manufacturers, including recent pricing practices such as manufacturer’s coupons and risk-sharing contracts. We discuss the implications of these decisions fo...

This paper explores the efficiency of UK specialist and composite insurers transacting general insurance business. The concept of efficiency concerns an insurer’s ability to produce a given set of outputs (such as premiums and investment income) via the use of inputs such as administrative and sales staff and financial capital. An insurer is said to be technically efficient if it cannot reduce ...

In this study we investigate the function of risk management in financial institutions‟ investment decisions in asset-backed securities (ABS) prior to the 2008 financial crisis, and the interaction of this function with financial regulations. We employ U.S. insurance companies as a laboratory, which provides detailed security-level information on ABS investment. We find that strong risk managem...

This paper is a substantially revised and extended version of a preliminary paper presented at the 1993 ARIA Meeting in San Francisco. This research was funded in part by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The conclusions expressed here are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Introduction The National ...

We consider the consequences of narrow medical provider networks—offered by insurers on health care exchanges and employer-sponsored insurance markets—for inequality and welfare. We first describe current and proposed approaches to network regulation and propose a model of the health care market that can be used to evaluate the likely effects of these and other market design policies. The model...

Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. They are time dependent solutions of the Einstein field equations which radiate or transport energy. Although they have not been detected yet, the existence of gravitational waves has been proved indirectly from observations of the pulsar PSR 1913+16. This rapidly rotating binary system should emit gravitational radiation, henc...

We report the discovery of 3 pulsars, PSR J0030+0451, PSR J0711+09, and PSR J1313+09 that were found in a three dimensional (DM, period, position) search at 430 MHz using the 305m Arecibo telescope. PSR J0030+0451 is a nearby 4.8-millisecond solitary pulsar. Spin and astrometric parameters are presented for the three new pulsars. We have measured significant polarization in the millisecond puls...

We have observed the middle-aged pulsar PSR B0656+14 with the prism and the NUVMAMA detector of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to measure the pulsar spectrum and periodic pulsations in the near-ultraviolet (NUV). The pulsations are clearly detected, double-peaked and very similar to the optical pulse profile. The NUV pulsed fraction is 70 ± 12%. The spectral slope of the deredd...