Essays on Life Insurance and Household Decisions

Essays on Life Insurance and Household Decisions PDF Author: Jay H. Hong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description

Essays on Life Insurance and Household Decisions

Essays on Life Insurance and Household Decisions PDF Author: Jay H. Hong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description


Care Without Coverage

Care Without Coverage PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309083435
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.

Essays in Decision Making Under Uncertainty and the Political Economy of Institutions

Essays in Decision Making Under Uncertainty and the Political Economy of Institutions PDF Author: Esteban Jose Mendez Chacon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of two lines of research. The first line focuses on decision making under uncertainty. Specifically, I analyze the nature of risk preferences in life-insurance choices, and I examine adverse selection and moral hazard in private-healthcare markets in a context where the government provides universal healthcare. The second line focuses on the political economy of institutions, and I study the impact of a multinational company on the economic development of its host country during and after its tenure. In Chapter 1, I estimate a structural model of risk preferences from the choice of insured amount in life-insurance contracts. The literature investigating life-insurance purchases has mostly focused on survey data to estimate how demand for insurance depends on demographic and socioeconomic factors, leaving aside the task of estimating an underlying model of decision making that generates this demand. Using proprietary data on life-insurance choices, I estimate a model of risky choice to explain households' decisions. My results indicate that, in addition to standard risk aversion (decreasing marginal utility for wealth), including decision weights that might differ from the actual probabilities improves the fit of the model. These weights can be interpreted as a combination of state-dependent utility and probability distortions. Moreover, I find support for the existence of heterogeneity in preferences. Women are more risk averse than men, and the decision weights vary depending on gender and age. In Chapter 2, we investigate adverse selection and moral hazard in private healthcare in markets where the government provides universal healthcare. We use proprietary data on health-insurance choices and medical expenditures to examine asymmetric information in this institutional setting. We disentangle adverse selection and moral hazard by leveraging variation in copays and deductibles implemented by the insurance company, and the fact that, for a sample of customers, the insured amount was exogenously assigned, shutting down the adverse selection channel. We find evidence for the presence of asymmetric information, both in the form of adverse selection and moral hazard. Moreover, we develop a model that incorporates sources of heterogeneity that could potentially explain selection in this institutional setting, namely risk aversion, risk type, concern for health, and taste for convenience services offered in the private healthcare sector. In Chapter 3, we analyze the impact of large-scale FDI on economic development by studying the case of the United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Costa Rica from 1889 to 1984. We implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land, and census data geo-referenced at the census-block level for 1973, 1984, 2000 and 2011. These allow us to identify the company's effect during its tenure, and after it stopped production. We find that former "UFCo lands" have had higher living standards and better economic outcomes than counterfactual areas without the company's presence, and that convergence is slow. These findings are validated using nighttime lights data. Detailed historical data suggest that the mechanisms behind our results are.

Essays on Saving, Bequests, Altruism, and Life-cycle Planning

Essays on Saving, Bequests, Altruism, and Life-cycle Planning PDF Author: Laurence J. Kotlikoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263344
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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Book Description
This collection of essays, coauthored with other distinguished economists, offers new perspectives on saving, intergenerational economic ties, retirement planning, and the distribution of wealth. The book links life-cycle microeconomic behavior to important macroeconomic outcomes, including the roughly 50 percent postwar decline in America's rate of saving and its increasing wealth inequality. The book traces these outcomes to the government's five-decade-long policy of transferring, in the form of annuities, ever larger sums from young savers to old spenders. The book presents new theoretical and empirical analyses of altruism that rule out the possibility that private intergenerational transfers have offset those by the government.While rational life-cycle behavior can explain broad economic outcomes, the book also shows that a significant minority of households fail to make coherent life-cycle saving and insurance decisions. These mistakes are compounded by reliance on conventional financial planning tools, which the book compares with Economic Security Planner (ESPlanner), a new life-cycle financial planning software program. The application of ESPlanner to U.S. data indicates that most Americans approaching retirement age are saving at much lower rates than they should be, given potential major cuts in Social Security benefits.

Essays on Household Decision

Essays on Household Decision PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
This thesis considers the fact that the majority of households consists of two adults whose characteristics and preferences matter for the households' decisions. The rst chapter studies how an increase in the generosity of maternity leave payments a ects parental labor supply, early child development, and the relative well-being of the parents considering that parents may have di erent preferences over outcomes and that the policy change may a ect the parental bargaining positions. I develop and estimate a static cooperative Nash bargaining model of parental decision-making in the rst period of the child's life and use the model to investigate how the decision-making changes with an increase in the leave payments. The results indicate that mothers will spend more time at home rather than in the labor market when the leave payments increase, but that the average early child development is not much a ected. Furthermore, the policy shifts the bargaining positions within the household in favor of the father and, although both parents are better o from the policy change, the mother would be better o relative to the father without the increase in maternity leave payments. In the second chapter we look closer at how the insurance value of marriage, represented by the correlation of shocks to individual incomes, varies over di erent groups in the popu- lation. We nd that this value may be lower for more recent cohorts, and decrease with age and with higher education. The third chapter builds on the second. We investigate the importance of intra-household risk-sharing through labor supply by testing the following prediction: A higher correlation of income shocks within the household implies a lower ability to insure income through spousal labor supply and should, all else equal, lead to higher asset accumulation of the house- hold. Our results indicate that this prediction holds empirically, suggesting that households perceive spousal labor supply as an important income insurance.

Model Rules of Professional Conduct

Model Rules of Professional Conduct PDF Author: American Bar Association. House of Delegates
Publisher: American Bar Association
ISBN: 9781590318737
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Families Caring for an Aging America

Families Caring for an Aging America PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309448093
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

Essays on Current Topics in Life Insurance

Essays on Current Topics in Life Insurance PDF Author: Gunther Kraut
Publisher: VVW GmbH
ISBN: 3862983269
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Das Buch erscheint in englischer Sprache. Das Buch widmet sich verschiedenen aktuellen Themen der Lebensversicherung, insbesondere dem Management von extremen Mortalitätsrisiken und dem Versicherungsnehmerverhalten. Am Beispiel illiquider Märkte für Katastrophenrisiken wird ein axiomatisch hergeleiteter Mechanismus entwickelt, der die Poolanteilsbestimmung in Risikotragegemeinschaften von mehreren Versicherungsunternehmen auf eindeutig bestimmte Weise fairer macht. Ein solcher Mechanismus könnte in bestimmten Marktsituationen dazu beitragen, vorhandene Marktkapazitäten effizienter zu nutzen und die sogenannte Grenze der Versicherbarkeit auszuweiten. Des Weiteren wird qualitativ untersucht, wie die Entwicklung solcher neuartigen Risikotransfertechniken durch die Versicherungsregulierung befördert oder behindert werden kann. Am Beispiel des Aufsichtsregimes Solvency II wird als Resultat dieser Analyse ein generisches internes Partialmodell entwickelt, das die Anerkennung gerade nicht-proportionaler Risikotransferinstrumente erleichtert und - wo sinnvoll - durch eine entsprechende Anreizsetzung erstrebenswert macht. Nach einem thematischen Sprung in die Welt der Sparprodukte wird zuletzt das dynamische Stornoverhalten von Versicherungsnehmern für sogenannte Variable-Annuity-Produkte empirisch untersucht. Auf verhaltensökonomischer Theorie aufbauend können Aussagen zur Finanzrationalität der Versicherungsnehmer gewonnen werden, die auch generelle Rückschlüsse auf die Bewertung von in Finanzprodukte eingebetteten Optionen durch Individuen zulassen. Durch diese breite thematische Aufstellung richtet sich das Buch sowohl an die Wissenschaft als auch an die Praxis. Insbesondere für Produktentwickler, Risikomanager und Aufseher sollten die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse von direktem Nutzen sein.

Three Essays on Household Behavior

Three Essays on Household Behavior PDF Author: Katherine Grace Carman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description


Social Q's

Social Q's PDF Author: Philip Galanes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145160579X
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A series of whimsical essays by the New York Times "Social Q's" columnist provides modern advice on navigating today's murky moral waters, sharing recommendations for such everyday situations as texting on the bus to splitting a dinner check.