Advantageous (or propitious) selection occurs when an increase in the premium of an insurance contract induces high-cost agents to quit, thereby reducing the average cost among remaining buyers. Hemenway (1990) and many subsequent contributions motivate its advent by differences in risk-aversion...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

People often fail to insure against catastrophes, even when insurance is subsidized. Even when insuring homes, many homeowners still underinsure the full value of their assets. Some researchers have suggested using long-term insurance contracts to reduce these insurance gaps. We examine...

This paper introduces the probabilistic formulation of continuous-time economic models: forward stochastic differential equations (SDE) govern the dynamics of backward-looking variables, and backward SDEs capture that of forward-looking variables. Deep learning streamlines the search for the...

We examine how long-term life insurance contracts can be designed to incorporate uncertain future bequest needs. An individual who buys a life insurance contract early in life is often uncertain about the future financial needs of his or her family, in the event of an untimely death. Ideally,...

Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000...

The high and increasing cost of natural disasters around the world motivates a growing body of literature on the role of natural disaster insurance in adapting to climate change. This chapter reviews current challenges in both public and private natural disaster insurance markets in the United...

Subjective evaluations are widely used, but call for different contracts from traditional moral-hazard settings. Previous literature shows that contracts require payments to third parties, which real-world contracts rarely use. I show that the implicit assumption of deterministic contracts makes...

In this paper we explore the implication of a morbidity risk for the relationship between longevity and annuitization. We divide old-age life into two periods with uncertain survival from the end of the first to the end of the second. We show that a rise in the survival rate causes different...

We construct a tractable discrete-time overlapping generations model of a closed economy and use it to study government redistribution of accidental bequests and private annuities in general equilibrium. Individuals face longevity risk as there is a positive probability of passing away before...