The Journal of Economic Literature codes classification system (JEL) published by the American Association (AEA) is de facto standard for research literature in economics. JEL used to classify articles, dissertations, books, book reviews, and working papers EconLit, a database maintained AEA. Over time, it has evolved extended with over 850 subclasses. This paper reviews history development sys...

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI holders.Further,we find that hospitals offering private insurees shorter waiting times as compared to SHI...

This paper proposes a consistent approach to discrete time valuation in insurance and finance. This approach uses the growth optimal portfolio as reference unit or benchmark. When used as benchmark, it is shown that all benchmarked price processes are supermartingales. Benchmarked fair price processes are characterized as martingales. No measure transformation is needed for the fair pricing of ...

Savings for Unemployment in Good or Bad Times: Options for Developing Countries The paper describes and evaluates unemployment insurance savings accounts (UISAs) – a relatively new and not well-known way of providing unemployment benefits. The UISAs reduce work disincentives by allowing recipients to keep their own unused unemployment contributions, and offer the possibility to extend coverage ...

We examine optimal taxation and social insurance with adverse selection in competitive insurance markets. In the previous literature, it has been shown that, with perfect insurance markets, social insurance improves welfare since it is able to redistribute without creating distortions. This result has been taken as robust to the introduction of adverse selection as this would only provide addit...

Conditional expected values in Markov chains are solutions to a set of associated backward differential equations, which may be ordinary or partial depending on the number of relevant state variables. This paper investigates the validity of these differential equations by locating the points of non-smoothness of the state-wise conditional expected values, and it presents a numerical method for ...

The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the costs and benefits of explicit deposit insurance. To this end, we compare the opportunity-cost value of deposit insurance services for a large sample of banks drawn from countries with or without explicit deposit insurance. After correcting for certain bankand country-specific factors, we find that the existence of explicit deposit i...

Twenty-seven years after switching to a fully-funded privately-managed pension system, Chilean lawmakers are concerned that only 58% of the labor force made contributions in 2000. I develop a dynamic model of the joint husband and wife labor and saving decisions to study whether mandatory contributions affects incentives to choose self-insurance over social insurance. Households face a dual lab...

This study uses three rounds of panel data between October 1998 and November 1999 and covering 506 villages and 24,000 households in rural Mexico, to examine how the replacement of pre-existing subsidy programs by a conditional cash transfer program such as PROGRESA (the Health, Education and Nutrition Program) affects the consumption smoothing of households. The results obtained are consistent...

This paper uses household data to test whether microfinance institutions created by the Malawian government in the mid-1990s under its Poverty Alleviation Programme crowded out access to informal loans. As in several recent studies, the paper adopts policy evaluation techniques to identify a causal relationship between access to government-sponsored credit programmes and informal loans. After t...