We analyze the empirical relationship between opportunistic fraud and business cycle. We find that residual opportunistic fraud exists both in the contract with replacement cost endorsement and the contract with no-deductible endorsement in the Taiwan automobile theft insurance market. These...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We present evidence to support the existence of opportunistic fraud in the automobile theft insurance market in Taiwan. After encountering a typhoon hit, the insured who purchase automobile theft insurance but do not purchase typhoon/flood insurance tend to...</p>

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This article examines the accident externality from driving in terms of loss probability and severity by using a unique individual-level data set with more than 3 million observations from Taiwan. Two types of accident externality are, respectively, measured:...</p>

Evidence on adverse selection in slave markets remains inconclusive. A necessary prerequisite is that buyers and sellers have different information. We study informational asymmetry on the slave markets through notarial acts on public slave auctions in Mauritius between 1825 and 1835, involving...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of absenteeism. The authors extend the typical labor-leisure model used to analyze the decision to skip work to include firm-level policy variables relevant to the absenteeism decision and uncertainty about the cost of absenteeism. Estimates...

We analyze the optimal choices of agents with utility functions whose derivatives alternate in sign, an important class that includes most of the functions commonly used in economics and finance (Mixed Risk Aversion, MRA, Caballé and Pomansky, 1996). We propose a comparative mixed risk aversion...

Purchasing reinsurance reduces insurers’ insolvency risk by stabilizing loss experience, increasing capacity, limiting liability on specific risks, and/or protecting against catastrophes. Consequently, reinsurance purchase should reduce capital costs. However, transferring risk to reinsurers...

Corporate finance theory predicts that firms’ characteristics affect agency costs and hence their efficiency. Cummins et al (2006) have proposed a cost function specification that measures separately insurer efficiency in handling risk pooling, risk management, and financial intermediation...