Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Risk Insurance and Production written by Seyyed Ali Zeytoon Nejad Moosavian and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Risk and Insurance written by Bum Kim and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Capital and Risk in Insurance Production written by George Zanjani and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Extensions in Risk Uncertainty and Insurance written by Christopher Andrew Whaley and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first essay, we prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a rent-seeking contest given a class of heterogeneous risk-loving players. We explore the role third-order risk attitude plays in equilibrium and find that imprudence is sufficient for risk lovers to increase rent-seeking investment above the risk-neutral outcome. Moreover, we show that rent can be fully dissipated in a standard Tullock contest when there is a large number of risk-loving players. In the second essay, we investigates the impact classic variables like medical care and lifestyle choices have on the mean, variance and skewness of a health distribution. We achieve this by positing health as output from a stochastic production process, a seemingly practical advantage over much of the deterministic literature. We leverage this unique approach to estimate how a set of explanatory variables impact the conditional moments of a health distribution. We then use these moments in a maximum entropy framework to analyze the shape impact of medical care. We find evidence of "flat of the curve'' medicine but also demonstrate the higher-order benefits of additional medical care. In the third and final essay, we investigate risk in the context of farmer and their choice of irrigation. While the benefits and utilization of crop irrigation have long been examined in agricultural economics, little attention is paid to the potential confounding relationship that may exist with other risk-management tools. Specifically, we pursue how standard crop insurance relates to irrigation. We identify irrigation as a form of self-protection, reducing the probability of crop loss due to adverse stochastic conditions. Given this, we investigate if irrigation acts as a complement to crop insurance. We test this relationship within a model of crop yields, identifying that jointly irrigated and insured lands both receive higher average yield and lead to variance and skewness effects on the overall yield distribution.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Selected Multi Period Insurance Decisions with Private Information written by Petra Steinorth and published by Verlag Versicherungswirtsch.. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Petra Steinorth präsentiert in ihrer in englischer Sprache vorgelegten kumulativen Dissertationsschrift drei theoretische Modelle, die Versicherungsentscheidungen über mehrere Perioden und bei privater Information seitens der Versicherungsnehmer ökonomisch untersuchen. Die Dissertation leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur theoretischen Forschung im Bereich Ver-sicherungsökonomie, da insbesondere zu mehrperiodigen Fragestellungen noch großer Forschungsbedarf besteht: Der Beitrag „Impact of Health Savings Accounts on Precautionary Savings, Demand for Health Insurance and Prevention Effort“ untersucht den Einfluss von steuerlich begünstigten Gesundheitssparkonten auf das Sparverhalten, die Nachfrage nach Krankenversicherung und Prävention. Im zweiten Beitrag „Yes, No, Perhaps – Explaining the Demand for Risk Classification Insurance with Imperfect Private Information“ wird untersucht, welche Granularität der Risikoklassifizierung optimal ist, wenn die Versicherungsnehmer unvollständige private Information über ihren zukünftigen Risikotyp haben. Der dritte Beitrag „The Demand for Enhanced Annuities“ analysiert die Reaktion des Marktes auf die Einführung von sogenannten Enhanced Annuities. Dabei handelt es sich um Rentenversicherungsprodukte, die die individuelle Lebenserwartung bei der Tarifierung berücksichtigen. Die wissenschaftliche Arbeit ist auch für Mitarbeiter in Versicherungsunternehmen von Interesse, da sie wichtige Bereiche des Produktmanagements in der Lebens- und Krankenversicherung behandelt. Petra Steinorth’s dissertation consists of three theoretical models, which all examine the economics of selected multi-period insurance decisions with private information on the part of the insured. The thesis makes an important contribution to insurance economics literature as multi-period problems have not yet been widely studied. The article “Impact of Health Savings Accounts on Precautionary Savings, Demand for Health Insurance and Prevention Effort” investigates how tax incentives like health savings accounts influence savings for medical costs, the demand for health insurance and ex ante moral hazard. The second article “Yes, no, perhaps – Explaining the Demand for Risk Classification Insurance” examines the optimal risk classification in case the insured have incomplete private information regarding their future risk type. The third article “The Demand for Enhanced Annuities” analyzes the market reaction to the introduction of so-called enhanced annuities, which are annuities that take individual factors influencing life expectancy into account for pricing. The scientific dissertation is also of interest to insurance practitioners as it examines important issues in the field of health and life insurance product management.

Download or read book The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions written by Martin Shubik and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.

Download or read book Essays in the Economic Theory of Risk and Insurance written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Information Risk and Insurance written by Alma Cohen and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Risk Uncertainty and Profit written by Frank H. Knight and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Health Insurance Markets written by Richard Domurat and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three chapters on the health insurance markets established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as exchanges. Chapter 1 estimates the demand for each plan in the California exchange using a discrete choice model. The model incorporates heterogeneity in consumer preferences and in product characteristics, including hospital and primary care physician (PCP) networks. Endogeneity of prices is addressed using networking hospital costs as instruments, and prices for any given plan can vary across consumers within a market. Consumers are highly sensitive to prices, with market shares declining by 3%-5% for just a $1 increase in the premium. Demand also responds to hospital and PCP networks, but to a relatively small degree. Along the take-up margin, a $1 increase in premium subsidy increases take-up by 1.4%. Chapter 2 uses a structural model of demand and supply to examine how two insurance market regulations--community rating and risk adjustment--affect prices and enrollment in the ACA exchange in California. Without risk adjustment, community rating in the ACA would lead to a significant reduction in enrollment in desirable plans and in take-up overall. Risk adjustment under the ACA roughly restores relative shares across plans to what they would be without community rating; however, the reduction in take-up is not restored. An alternative risk adjustment method can increase enrollment by 3.0% and would have little impact on government spending. Chapter 3, written jointly with Isaac Menashe and Wesley Yin, examines the impact of information on insurance take-up in the ACA. We exploit experimental variation in the information mailed to 87,000 households in California's exchange to study the role of frictions in insurance take-up. We find that a basic reminder of the enrollment deadline raised enrollment by 1.4 pp (or 16 percent). Compared to the reminder alone, also reporting personalized subsidy benefits increases take-up among low-income individuals, but decreases take-up among higher-income individuals. This is despite reminder-only recipients eventually observing their subsidies before purchase. Finally, the letter interventions induced healthier individuals into the market, lowering aggregate spending risk by 5.9 percent, suggesting these interventions can improve both enrollment and average market risk.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Risk Management written by Huang Chen and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is motivated by two important policy changes in China's agricultural sector. First, the market-oriented land reform policies, such as strengthening individual property rights, are expected to raise productivity through multiple mechanisms including increased investment demand and land consolidation, which would take advantage of scale economies. Second, the subsidization and promotion of agricultural insurance are expected to increase agricultural investment by stabilizing farmers' income and expanding credit supply. In this dissertation, I explore a range of theoretical and empirical questions through the lens of the economics of risk to understand the potential impacts of the policies and generate insights for future policy design. The first study, "Agricultural Risk, Insurance, and the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity", examines the potential for unintended adverse impacts of land consolidation on farm productivity and evaluates the degree to which insurance can mitigate the adverse impacts. Land consolidation may lower productivity and output if, as found commonly in the literature, an inverse relationship exists between farm-size and yield. I first develop a farm-household model that identifies an "Income Share Effect" (ISE), which provides a new risk-based explanation rooted in the Chinese context for the inverse relationship. In China, the prevalence of very small plots implies that most farm households have surplus labor and dedicate significant time to non-farm activities. As land size increases, farmers shift labor away from low-risk, off-farm activities and devote more time to risky farming. Land consolidation and the creation of a class of commercial family farms thus increases the share of household income at risk and leads larger farmers to behave more conservatively in their farming decisions. In the absence of insurance markets, the land reform policies may thus achieve the goal of land consolidation but at a cost of lower productivity. I then show that the introduction of perfect crop insurance offsets the inverse relationship as larger farmers are able to protect their specialized agricultural portfolio. I empirically test for the existence of the inverse relationship in the absence of insurance. I find that a 1 mu increase in farm size causes a 1.6 yuan/mu decrease in the value of yields. This implies that if average land size increases from the sample mean in 2013, which is 67mu/farm, to 100mu/farm in China, total production would decrease by 3%, a considerable magnitude when talking about national food supply. Finally, I show that the availability of crop insurance has a significant positive impact on productivity, allowing farmers to “recover” the productivity lost due to the inverse relationship. Because of the limitations of conventional agricultural insurance, China's government is considering promoting an index insurance market. However, based on experiences from other countries, low take-up rates could be an obstacle in developing this market. I investigate the issue of demand for index insurance in Chapter 3: "Theoretical Explanations of Low Take-up Rates of Weather Index Insurance". I use an expected-utility framework to explore the role of three determinants of insurance demand: subjective beliefs about weather risk, index quality as measured by basis risk (the risk of contractual non-performance) and, farmer heterogeneity in vulnerability to weather risk. The model clarifies how combinations of contract quality and farmer vulnerability map into welfare gains for and insurance demand by farmers. I then use 52 years of China's agricultural production and weather data to simulate demand and welfare impacts of the introduction of an index insurance market in 26 provinces.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Food and Health Behavior written by Elizbeth Robison Botkins and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the `farm to table' trend, the idea of understanding linkages between agricultural supply, food systems, and the food that is consumed, has been growing in popularity. This dissertation takes this idea a step further and examines topics on the progression from `farm to health outcomes.' It is important to recognize not only that food systems impact the way consumers eat, but that those food choices impact health outcomes and the way that medical care is consumed. The three essays of this dissertation examine three separate points along this continuum to improve the understanding of how food systems, food choice, health outcomes, and healthcare consumption interact. The first essay evaluates factors associated with school districts' decisions to participate in farm to school (FTS) programs. I leverage the USDA's Farm to School Census to analyze factors associated with FTS participation, the types of FTS activities implemented, and the challenges faced by participating school districts. I use spatially articulate data to estimate the spatial spillover effects of FTS participation. The results demonstrate that both school characteristics and local farm production factors are associated with FTS participation. The estimated spatial spillover effect is positive, suggesting that areas with a high penetration of FTS activities have lower barriers associated with implementing FTS programs. In my second essay, I shift to evaluating how parent-child pairs make the daily school lunch decision. Meals served in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are on average more healthful than alternatives, implying that increasing participation in the NSLP can improve nutrition for a large number of children. However, there is little understanding of the household decision process that determines participation in the NSLP. This study uses a parent-child choice experiment to assess the impact of both parent and child on NSLP participation. The results show that both have a significant impact on the chosen meal, where parents are concerned with meal palatability and nutrition, while the child only cares about palatability. The decision is also influenced by the household structure and demographics, and the inclusion of local foods in the school lunch option. My final essay evaluates how access to medical care can impact lifestyle choices. I evaluate if there is an ex ante moral hazard effect in health insurance markets. Ex ante moral hazard occurs when an individual takes on more risk knowing they will not bear the full cost of the consequences. In the case of health insurance, this could mean taking on unhealthful eating habits knowing that if these habits lead to illness the cost of care will be covered by insurance. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Youth Survey 1997, I find evidence of an ex ante moral hazard effect in BMI, binge drinking, and smoking, suggesting that people take on less healthful behaviors, holding all else constant, when they have health insurance. The existence of ex ante moral hazard suggests that insurance companies can seek efficiency gains by finding ways to structure policies that diminish this moral hazard effect.

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Economics written by David Russell Hansen and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.

Download or read book Three Essays in Economics and Law written by Jonathan Brody Baker and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Development Economics and Behavioral Economics written by Changcheng Song and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies retirement savings, weather insurance take-up and reference-dependent theory in the literature of development economics and behavioral economics. It consists of two field experiments and one laboratory experiment. In Chapter one, I uses a field experiment to study the relationship between financial literacy and retirement savings in China. When the Chinese government launched a highly subsidized pension system in rural areas in 2009, 73% of households chose to save at a level that is lower than that implied by a benchmark life-cycle model. We test to what extent the low contribution level is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of compound interest. In a field experiment with more than 1000 Chinese households, we randomly assigned some households to a financial education treatment, emphasizing the concept of compound interest. This treatment increased the pension contribution by roughly 40%. The increase accounts for 51% of the gap between contribution levels in the Control group and those implied by the benchmark model. To pinpoint mechanisms, we elicited financial literacy after the intervention, and added a third group in which we explain the pension benefit in general. We find that the neglect of compound interest is correlated with low contributions to the pension plans in the control group, and that financial education about compound interest does help households partially correct their erroneous understanding of compound interest. Moreover, explaining compound interest increases their ability to translate benefits into their own situation. Welfare analysis suggests that financial education increases total welfare, although the fact that the treatment effects are heterogeneous implies that some households end up saving more than the level implied by the benchmark model. In Chapter two (coauthored with Jing Cai), we use a novel experimental design to test the role of experience and information in insurance take-up in rural China, where weather insurance is a new and highly subsidized product. We randomly selected a group of poor households to play insurance games and find that it increases the actual insurance take-up by roughly 48%. To pinpoint mechanisms, we test whether the result is due to: (1) changes in risk attitudes, (2) changes in the perceived probability of future disasters, (3) learning the objective benefits of insurance, or (4) the experience of hypothetical disaster. We show that the overall effect is unlikely to be fully explained by mechanisms (1) to (3), and that the experience acquired in playing the insurance game matters. To explain these findings, we develop a descriptive model in which agents give less weight to disasters and benefits which they experienced infrequently. Our estimation also suggests that experience acquired in the recent insurance game has a stronger effect on the actual insurance take-up than that of real disasters in the previous year, implying that learning from experience displays a strong recency effect. In Chapter three, I conducted a controlled lab experiment to test to what extent expectations and the status quo determine the reference point. In the experiment, I explicitly manipulated stochastic expectations and exogenously varied expectations in different groups. In addition, I exogenously varied the time of receiving new information and tested whether individuals adjust their reference points to new information, and the speed of the adjustment. With this design, I jointly estimated the reference points and the preferences based on the reference points. I find that both expectations and the status quo influence the reference point but that expectations play a more important role. Structural estimation suggests that the model of the stochastic reference point fits my data better than that with expected utility certainty equivalent as the reference point. The result also suggests that subjects adjust reference points quickly, which further confirms the role of expectation as reference point.

Download or read book Selected Works of Joseph E Stiglitz written by Joseph E. Stiglitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second in a series of six volumes containing a selection of Joseph Stiglitz's most important and widely cited work. Volume I set out the basic concepts underlying the economics of information. Volume II extends these concepts and applies them to a number of different settings in labour, capital, and product markets

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Selected Multi Period Insurance Decisions with Private Information written by Petra Steinorth and published by VVW GmbH. This book was released on 2011 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Petra Steinorth präsentiert in ihrer in englischer Sprache vorgelegten kumulativen Dissertationsschrift drei theoretische Modelle, die Versicherungsentscheidungen über mehrere Perioden und bei privater Information seitens der Versicherungsnehmer ökonomisch untersuchen. Die Dissertation leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur theoretischen Forschung im Bereich Versicherungsökonomie, da insbesondere zu mehrperiodigen Fragestellungen noch großer Forschungsbedarf besteht: Der Beitrag ""Impact of Health Savings Accounts on Precautionary Savings, Demand for Health Insurance and Prevention Effort"" untersucht den Einfluss von steuerlich begünstigten Gesundheitssparkonten auf das Sparverhalten, die Nachfrage nach Krankenversicherung und Prävention. Im zweiten Beitrag ""Yes, No, Perhaps - Explaining the Demand for Risk Classification Insurance with Imperfect Private Information"" wird untersucht, welche Granularität der Risikoklassifizierung optimal ist, wenn die Versicherungsnehmer unvollständige private Information über ihren zukünftigen Risikotyp haben. Der dritte Beitrag ""The Demand for Enhanced Annuities"" analysiert die Reaktion des Marktes auf die Einführung von sogenannten Enhanced Annuities. Dabei handelt es sich um Rentenversicherungsprodukte, die die individuelle Lebenserwartung bei der Tarifierung berücksichtigen. Die wissenschaftliche Arbeit ist auch für Mitarbeiter in Versicherungsunternehmen von Interesse, da sie wichtige Bereiche des Produktmanagements in der Lebens- und Krankenversicherung behandelt. Petra Steinorth ́s dissertation consists of three theoretical models, which all examine the economics of selected multi-period insurance decisions with private information on the part of the insured. The thesis makes an important contribution to insurance economics literature as multi-period problems have not yet been widely studied. The article ""Impact of Health Savings Accounts on Precautionary Savings, Demand for Health Insurance and Prevention Effort"" investigates how tax incentives like health savings accounts influence savings for medical costs, the demand for health insurance and ex ante moral hazard. The second article ""Yes, no, perhaps - Explaining the Demand for Risk Classification Insurance"" examines the optimal risk classification in case the insured have incomplete private information regarding their future risk type. The third article ""The Demand for Enhanced Annuities"" analyzes the market reaction to the introduction of so-called enhanced annuities, which are annuities that take individual factors influencing life expectancy into account for pricing. The scientific dissertation is also of interest to insurance practitioners as it examines important issues in the field of health and life insurance product management."