Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

We prove the existence of an equilibrium in competitive markets with adverse selection in the sense of Miyazaki (1977), Wilson (1977), and Spence (1978) when the distribution of unobservable risk types is continuous. Our proof leverages the finite-type proof in Spence (1978) and a limiting...

We consider a competitive insurance market with adverse selection. Unlike the standard models, we assume that individuals receive the benefit of some type of potential government assistance that guarantees them a minimum level of wealth. For example, this assistance might be some type of...

We consider successive generations of non-altruistic individuals carrying either a good or bad gene. Daughters are more likely to inherit their mother's gene. Competitive insurers can perform a genetic test revealing an agent's gene. They can condition their quotes on the agent's or on her...

Using a large and comprehensive dataset of 9,002 life insurance policies with aggregate death benefit of $24.14 billion purchased from their original owners between 2001 and 2011, we compute the expected return on individual policies. We find that the primary determinant of the expected return...

The calculation of a fair premium is always a challenging topic in the real world insurance applications. In this paper, a nonlinear premium-reserve (P-R) model is presented and the premium is derived by minimizing a quadratic performance criterion. The reserve is a stochastic equation, which...

We analyze the effect of ambiguous loss probabilities on competitive insurance markets with asymmetric information. We characterize equilibria under actuarially fair pricing with preferences that are second-order ambiguity averse (have smooth indifference curves). We also show existence of...

We document a large and persistent anomaly in the UK car insurance market over the period 2012-13: insurance companies charged a higher premium for third-party (liability) insurance than comprehensive insurance (which includes third-party). Furthermore, some companies charged higher prices for...

How does catastrophe-risk awareness affect selection patterns in catastrophe insurance markets? Catastrophe insurance is often provided by government entities and frequently involves substantial cross-subsidization between people facing very different levels of risk, which could generate adverse...

This paper extends the theoretical literature on underwriting cycles by assuming insurers have heterogeneous exposure to a catastrophe. Distinct from the existing literature on insurance cycles, we model optimal contracting by competitive insurers. Since losses take time to pay out, and insurers...