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on Insurance Economics |
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Issue of 2013‒09‒26
nine papers chosen by Soumitra K Mallick Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management |
| By: | International Monetary Fund. Monetary and Capital Markets Department |
| Keywords: | Insurance regulations;Insurance supervision;Financial Sector Assessment Program;Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes;India; |
| Date: | 2013–08–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:13/265&r=ias |
| By: | De Donder, Philippe; Pestieau, Pierre |
| Abstract: | We study the political determination of the level of social long-term care insurance when voters also choose private insurance and saving amounts. Agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Social insurance redistributes across income and risk levels, while private insurance is actuarially fair. The income-to-risk ratio of agents determines whether they prefer social or private insurance. Family support crowds out the demand for both social and, especially, private insurance, as strong prospects of family help drive the demand for private insurance to zero. The availability of private insurance decreases the demand for social insurance but need not decrease its majority chosen level. |
| Keywords: | crowding out; familism; long-term care; social insurance; voting; weak and strong prospects of family help |
| JEL: | D72 I13 J14 |
| Date: | 2013–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9587&r=ias |
| By: | International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept. |
| Keywords: | Financial sector;Banks;Bank supervision;Basel Core Principles;Financial safety nets;Deposit insurance;Risk management;Insurance;Capital markets;Pension funds;Payment systems;Financial system stability assessment;Bahamas, The; |
| Date: | 2013–04–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:13/101&r=ias |
| By: | Neeraj Sood; Yanyu Wu |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the effects of health insurance and new antiviral treatments on HIV testing rates among the U.S. general population using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) for the years 1993 to 2002. We estimate recursive bivariate probit models with insurance coverage and HIV testing as the dependent variables. We use changes in Medicaid eligibility and distribution of firm size over time within a state as instruments for insurance coverage. The results suggest that (a) insurance coverage increases HIV testing rates, (b) insurance coverage increases HIV testing rates more among the high risk population, and (c) the advent of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) increases the effects of insurance coverage on HIV testing for high risk populations. |
| JEL: | I12 I13 |
| Date: | 2013–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19397&r=ias |
| By: | International Monetary Fund. Monetary and Capital Markets Department |
| Keywords: | Financial system stability assessment;Financial sector;Banks;Bank supervision;Basel Core Principles;Stress testing;Liquidity management;Bank resolution;Insurance supervision;Capital markets;Pensions;Financial stability;Risk management;Colombia; |
| Date: | 2013–02–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:13/50&r=ias |
| By: | International Monetary Fund. African Dept. |
| Keywords: | Financial sector;Banks;Islamic banking;Stress testing;Liquidity management;Bank supervision;Deposit insurance;Risk management;Payment systems;Anti-money laundering;Combating the financing of terrorism;Financial system stability assessment;Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes;Nigeria; |
| Date: | 2013–05–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:13/140&r=ias |
| By: | Casey B. Mulligan |
| Abstract: | Measured in percentage points, the Affordable Care Act will, by 2015, add about twelve times more to average marginal labor income tax rates nationwide than the Massachusetts health reform added to average rates in Massachusetts following its 2006 statewide health reform. The rate impacts are different between the two laws for several reasons, especially that: the populations subject to the two laws are different, the Affordable Care Act’s employer penalty is an order of magnitude greater, before either reform Massachusetts had already been offering more means-tested and employment-tested health insurance assistance than other states had, and the subsidized health insurance plans created by the Massachusetts reform were less substitutable for employer-provided insurance than are the subsidized plans to be created nationwide next year. |
| JEL: | E24 H31 I18 I38 |
| Date: | 2013–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19366&r=ias |
| By: | Raquel Fonseca; Pierre-Carl Michaud; Arie Kapteyn; Titus Galama |
| Abstract: | We estimate a stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and longevity in the U.S. over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change and the increase in the generosity of health insurance on their own may explain 36% of the rise in health spending (technology 30% and insurance 6%), while income explains only 4% and other health trends 0.5%. By simultaneously occurring over this period, these changes may have led to complementarity effects which we find to explain an additional 57% increase in health spending. The estimates suggest that the elasticity of health spending with respect to changes in both income and insurance is larger with co-occurring improvements in technology. Technological change, taking the form of increased health care productivity at an annual rate of 1.3%, explains almost all of the rise in life expectancy at age 25 over this period while changes in insurance and income together explain less than 10%. Welfare gains are substantial and most of the gain appears to be due to technological change. |
| Keywords: | Demand for health, life cycle, health spending, technology, insurance, longevity |
| JEL: | J01 I1 O33 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1326&r=ias |
| By: | Benjamin R. Handel; Jonathan T. Kolstad |
| Abstract: | Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk. In practice, choosing an insurance plan from a set of complex non-linear contracts is a complicated decision often made without full information on several potentially important dimensions. In this paper we combine new administrative data on health plan choices and claims with unique survey data on consumer information and other typically unobserved preference factors in order to separately identify risk preferences, information frictions, and perceived plan hassle costs. The administrative and survey data are linked at the individual level, allowing in-depth investigations of the links between these micro- foundations in both descriptive and choice-model based analyses. We find that consumers lack information on many important dimensions that they are typically assumed to understand, perceive high plan hassle costs, and make choices that depend on these frictions. Moreover, in the context of an expected utility model, including the additional frictions that we measure has direct implications for risk preference estimates, which are typically assumed to be the only source of persistent unobserved preference heterogeneity in such models. In our setting, we show that incorporating measures of these frictions leads to meaningful reductions in estimated consumer risk aversion. This result has both positive and normative implications since risk aversion generally has different welfare implications than information frictions. We assess the welfare impact of a counterfactual menu design and find that the welfare loss from risk exposure when additional frictions are not taken into account is more than double that when they are, illustrating the potential importance of our analysis for policy decisions. |
| JEL: | D8 D83 G22 I13 |
| Date: | 2013–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19373&r=ias |