Reinsurance is a transaction insurance firms use to hedge risk. Existing studies have only investigated the demand for reinsurance. Thus, we do not have direct evidence on whether the use of reinsurance creates value. Our study provides this evidence. We find a positive relation between the use...

This study provides evidence that relative wealth placement substantially impacts risk-taking. We derive predictions on risk-taking in a standard portfolio problem in which individuals care about their placement in the wealth distribution relative to peers. In an incentivized laboratory...

The article shows that heterogeneous incomplete private information can explain the limited existence of guaranteed renewable health insurance (GR) contracts in an otherwise frictionless markets. We derive a unique equilibrium that can be of the form that either only a portion of the population...

We use the German Socio Economic Panel to analyze the impact of life changing events on individuals’ risk tolerance levels over time, which is reported in response to a question on individuals’ willingness to take risks. The dataset follows a representative sample of the German population....