Developing risk in the life insurance industry requires prudent policy response to prevent broader economic damage.

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as −19 percent for annuities and −57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market...

We develop a search-theoretic model of financial intermediation and use it to study how trading frictions affect the distribution of asset holdings, asset prices, efficiency, and standard measures of liquidity. A distinctive feature of our theory is that it allows for unrestricted asset...

Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their...