American hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to the uninsured. We use previously confidential hospital financial data to study the resulting uncompensated care, medical care for which no payment is received. We use both panel-data methods and case studies from state-wide Medicaid disenrollments and find that the uncompensated care costs of hospitals increase in response to ...

In order to apply asset-liabilitymanagement techniques to property-liability insurers, the sensitivity of liabilities to interest rate changes, or duration, must be calculated. The current approach is to use the Macaulay or modified duration calculations, both of which presume that the cash flows are invariant with respect to interest rate changes. Based on the structure of liabilities for prop...

We investigate risk selection between public and private health insurance in Germany. With risk-rated premiums in the private system and community-rated premiums in the public system, advantageous selection in favor of private insurers is expected. Using 2000 to 2007 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we find such selection. While private insurers are unable to select the h...

This paper presents a model of a competitive health insurance market with two risk types and two health benefits. In the benchmark case, community rating insurers (CRIs) are only allowed to offer the basic benefit. The additional benefit is sold by risk rating insurers (RRIs). It is shown that low risk types can only be better off at the expense of high risk types if CRIs are allowed to offer t...

With its promise of protection and peace mind, insurance ownership is a key component Australia’s national strategy to manage spread costs disaster recovery. We argue that an arduous confusing claims process can have profound impacts on policyholders’ capacities live safely in their homes as well physical mental health, finances, levels trust insurers. Yet there has been little empirical resear...

Many life insurance companies are turning to technology to speed and remove cost from the underwriting process. Automated underwriting systems have been developed to reduce the manpower, time and/or data necessary to underwrite a life insurance application, while maintaining the quality of underwriting decisions. Although these systems have been in existence for some time, not much is known abo...