There is no consensus among health economists about the specification of individual preferences that best fits observed behaviors. One crucial point of disagreement concerns the sign of the interaction between health and wealth in individual utility functions. We propose here a simple, static,...

The privatization of social services is being increasingly discussed. The market of social services is often characterized by market failures, like informational asymmetries, externalities, distributional problems, which all justify public intervention. But the quality of services provided by...

Managing interest rate risk for property-liability insurers requires appropriate measurement of the sensitivity of liabilities to movements in interest rates. Most prior studies have assumed that interest rates shift in a parallel fashion and that the cash flows from liabilities are unaffected...

The main tools and concepts of financial and actuarial theory are designed to handle standard, or even small risks. The aim of this paper is to reconsider some selected financial problems, in a setup including infrequent extreme risks. We first consider investors maximizing the expected utility...

Many real-world financial contracts have some sort of minimum rate of return guarantee included. One class of these guarantees is so-called relative guarantees, i.e., guarantees where the minimum guaranteed rate of return is given as a function of the stochastic return on a reference portfolio....

The paper focuses on secondary prevention, such as diagnostic screening, medical examinations and checks-up, which refers to the early detection of disease. Secondary prevention is analyzed as a self-insurance activity reducing the negative shock of illness and can be either complement or...

Considering a simple portfolio selection problem by agents with quadratic utility, an apparently counterintuitive outcome results. When such a choice is over two assets that can be ordered in terms of riskiness, an agent that is more risk averse may optimally invest a larger portion of wealth in...