This paper reports on an empirical investigation of a particular computerization movement—the diffusion of automated underwriting in the US home mortgage industry—over a twenty-plus year timeframe. Building on and extending seminal work by Kling and Iacono (1988, 1995, 2001), this paper shows the influences of, and interplays among, technological action frames, institutional support, and techno...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a 1993 relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks on bond issues in the Euro–yen and Japanese corporate bond markets. Evidence is presented to suggest that the relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks was associated with a significant fall in spreads in...

In recent column by James Reston in the New York Times, where he was discussing strategic planning, objectives and deeper meanings, he quoted Conrad Hilton who in answer to the question "What had he learned from his long life as a Hotelier?" said, "I’ve learned that it is better to keep the shower curtain within the tub". So it is in my relatively short span as an underwriter, I have learned th...

This paper focuses on potential interaction between the mortgage underwriting and pricing decisions for fair lending analysis of mortgage pricing. We argue that the loan approval or denial decision determines the loan origination population and therefore the underwriting policies might affect the fair lending assessment of the subsequent pricing decisions. The paper also finds that sample selec...

MetLife processes over 300,000 life insurance applications a year. Underwriting of these applications is labor intensive. Automation is difficult since they include many free-form text fields. MITA, MetLife's Intelligent Text Analyzer, uses the Information Extraction --IE-technique of Natural Language Processing to structure the extensive text fields on a life insurance application. Knowledge e...

In this paper, we consider the robust portfolio selection problem for an insurer in the sense of maximizing the exponential utility of his wealth. This special robust investment problem, where underwriting results and a risk-free asset are considered, differs from ordinary robust portfolio selection problems. The insurer has the option of investing in a risk-free asset and multiple risky assets...

Geneticists worry that their patients and the patients’ families will be subject to unfair discrimination by medical underwriters when the results of DNA tests show that the patients are predisposed to certain diseases. They point out that these individuals may be healthy at the time the test is carried out and that, without the test, they would be considered standard insurance risks. This appr...

OBJECTIVE This study aims to trace risk factors for disability amongst the self-employed. Knowledge about these risk factors can contribute to more evidence-based underwriting criteria for disability insurance. BACKGROUND The trend towards privatization of social disability services in certain insurance markets creates a need to consider the appropriateness of underwriting criteria in applica...

Insurance companies are in the business of risk taking built on trust. Optimal  underwriting  and  claims  management  standards  are  applied  to  safeguard  insurers’ against exposure to underwriting losses for enhanced performance. The main objective was determine relationship among underwriting, crisis management, regulatory framework and pe...