s: This paper attempts to understand the outcomes when each party of the insurance contracts simultaneously has superior information to the other. We decompose the risk of a policyholder into a general risk and a specific risk. We assume that policyholders have superior information about specific risks while insurers have superior information about general risks. When each risk can be either hi...

Depending on length-of-stay, somewhere between 29 percent and 38 percent of long-term care insurance purchasers who use nursing homes would qualify for Medicaid payments if they did not own a policy. This is equivalent to between 13 percent and 17 percent of all policyholders. Owning such a policy would, however, reduce spend-down rates among policyholders by 39 percent. Thus, in the presence o...

This paper examines the performance of property and liability reinsurance companies in the United States. It shows that these reinsurers have higher mean values than primary insurers in the following financial ratios: net operating income to net premium earned (NOI/PE), yield on invested assets (YIA), and loss reserves to net premium written (LR/NPW). Primary insurers, on the other hand, have h...

We study the valuation of unit-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. Instead of solving an optimal stopping problem, we propose a more realistic approach accounting for policyholders’ rationality in exercising their surrender option. The valuation is conducted at the portfolio level by assuming the surrender intensity to be bounded from below and from above. The lower bound...

The surrender option embedded in many life insurance products is a clause that allows policyholders to terminate the contract early. Pricing techniques based on the American Contingent Claim (ACC) theory are often used, though the actual policyholders’ behavior is far from optimal. Inspired by many prepayment models for mortgage backed securities, this paper builds a Rational Expectation (RE) m...

Accounting for unreported accidents due to ex post moral hazard is important for studying asymmetric information in insurance markets. In this paper, I study ex post moral hazard in an automobile insurance market with experience rating. I develop a dynamic model in which policyholders with private information about their risk types choose accident prevention efforts (ex ante moral hazard) and m...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of policyholders’ private information about risky traffic behavior on automobile insurance coverage and ex post risk. It combines insurance company information with the policyholders’ private information on risky traffic behavior (traffic violations) that is not accessible to the insurance company. It is demonstrated that being unable to reject the...

We study the effect of secondary markets on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. The policyholders are assumed to be boundedly rational in giving up their contracts, and a proportion of policyholders will access the secondary markets instead of surrendering the contracts to the insurance company. We formulate the valuation problems from both the insurance company’s ...

The study group included Dai-ichi Life policyholders who were covered by both a hospitalization and a life policy and who were admitted to a hospital between April 1985 and March 1993 with a diagnosis of cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or subarachnoid hemorrhage. Policyholders who were hospitalized for less than five days were excluded because contract language required a five-day wai...

BACKGROUND Tort law has legitimate social purposes of deterrence, punishment and compensation, but medical tort law does none of these well. Tort law could be counterproductive in medicine, encouraging costly defensive practices that harm some patients, restricting access to care in some settings and discouraging innovation. DISCUSSION Patients might be better served by purchasing combined he...