Economics

In this paper, we exploit the provision of higher UB at different points of the unemployment spell to shed light on the relative cost of insurance at different horizons after the job loss. First, we exploit a double cap system in an RDD setting to study the effect of higher benefit levels in the early part of unemployment spell on time on benefits and non-employment. We find that higher benefits increase the time spent on benefits and in non-employment, with no impact on new job quality. Second, we exploit an age-based discontinuity in benefit duration, which determines higher benefits later in the spell, to compare the behavioural and mechanical costs of these two variations in benefits. We..

Corporate bonds are a key source of funding for U.S. non-financial corporations and a key investment security for insurance companies, pension funds, and mutual funds. Distress in the corporate bond market can thus both impair access to credit for corporate borrowers and reduce investment opportunities for key financial sub-sectors. In a February 2021 Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced a unified measure of corporate bond market distress, the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), then followed up in early June 2022 with a look at how corporate bond market functioning evolved over 2022 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the tightening of U.S. monetary policy. T..

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of the 2012 reform on flows from UB to employment. The reform increased the steepness of the time profile of unemployment benefits by raising the initial benefit, lowering its long-term level and increasing the number of steps in-between. The analysis finds no indication that the 2012 reform of the Belgian UB system led to an increase in flows towards employment or inactivity either in the aggregate or when comparing groups of workers whose benefits were affected to different extents. While the results of this paper and recent literature provide little ground in favour of a further accentuation of the steepness of the time profile of UB in Belgi..

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is increasingly involved in offering policy advice on public pension issues to member countries. Public pension spending is important from both fiscal and welfare perspectives. Pension policy and its reforms can have significant fiscal and distribution implications, can influence labor supply and labor demand decisions, and may impact consumption and savings behavior. This technical note provides guidance on assessing public pension systems’ macrocriticality, i.e., sustainability, adequacy, and efficiency; it also discusses the issues and policy trade-offs to be considered when designing responses aiming to address these dimensions of the pension syste..

The Bangko Sentral Ng Pilipinas (BSP), together with the other financial sector regulators and the Department of Finance (DoF), made significant progress in developing a framework for macroprudential supervision. The BSP plays a central role as the bank and payment system supervisor, as well as macroprudential authority with with its financial stability mandate obtained in 2019, and the chair of inter-agency coordination mechanisms (Financial Stability Coordination Council, FSCC). The FSCC was established in 2011 as a voluntary interagency body (without decision-making powers) to coordinate macroprudential policies and crisis management and include the BSP, Securities Exchange Commission (SE..

There has been little change in the institutional framework for macroprudential policy oversight since the last FSAP. Macroprudential policy for the banking sector is a shared competency of the Financial Superintendency of Colombia (SFC), the Banco de la República (BR), and the Ministry of Finance (MHCP), although the SFC and the MHCP play dominant roles. The Financial Sector Coordination and Monitoring Committee (CCSSF), which consists of the three institutions and the Financial Institutions Guarantee Fund (Fogafin), is the main platform for information sharing and cooperation, but it does not have a macroprudential mandate or any formal powers. The SFC supervises asset managers and insura..

The first mission of the Colombia FSAP was conducted virtually during June 1–21, 2021. This technical note focuses on the developments in the crisis management framework for the banking sector. The assessment examines the Colombian financial safety net and crisis management arrangements in light of the international best practices and standards on resolution and deposit insurance standards.

We propose a method of studying the value of insurance. For this purpose, we analyze well-being of the same individuals, comparing sick and healthy years in German panel survey data on life satisfaction. To impose structure on the income–wellbeing gradient, we fit a flexible utility function to the data, focusing on the differences in marginal utility in the sick and the healthy state, by allowing for a “fixed cost of sickness”. We find that marginal utility of income is higher in the sick state. We use our estimates to gauge the value of sickness insurance for Baily-Chetty type optimal policy calculations. We also show that the income–wellbeing gradient has steepened over time in Ge..

The issue of how best to finance long-term care (LTC) is the subject of recent reforms, forthcoming reforms or continuing debate in various countries and remains as relevant and challenging as ever. LTC services are crucial to the wellbeing of large numbers of older adults who need help with everyday tasks. Demand for LTC for older adults is projected to rise across developed and developing countries as the number of older adults rises. Supply of care services is likely to remain constrained due to shortages of long-term care workforce and financial constraints in many countries, and the financial risks associated with LTC remain. Financing of LTC is a complicated issue which raises consider..

The existing literature provides evidence that public opinion and attitudes often affect public policy. However, little is known on how public policy might affect public attitudes and norms. I present new evidence on this topic by using age-based health insurance policies in the United States as natural experiments. I first exploit the discrete change in insurance coverage rates at age 26 due to the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate and show that this policy is associated with statistically significant deterioration in attitudes towards the necessity of health insurance among young adults who are affected by this policy the most. Next, I show that gaining health insurance at 6..

Knowing that insurance market might be sensitive to economic evolutions, the aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of few macroeconomic indicators on non-life insurance market in the Baltic States in the period 1993-2020. The results based on panel data models and panel cointegration suggest a low impact of economic growth on non-life insurance market described by direct premium written, insurance density, insurance penetration for non-life segment. Expenditure on tertiary education has a more significant impact on non-life insurance market, while growth in unemployment rates reduces the development of this market. All in all, this study validates the hypothesis that people with hig..

In this paper, we study two optimisation settings for an insurance company, under the constraint that the terminal surplus at a deterministic and finite time $T$ follows a normal distribution with a given mean and a given variance. In both cases, the surplus of the insurance company is assumed to follow a Brownian motion with drift. First, we allow the insurance company to pay dividends and seek to maximise the expected discounted dividend payments or to minimise the ruin probability under the terminal distribution constraint. Here, we find explicit expressions for the optimal strategies in both cases: in discrete and continuous time settings. Second, we let the insurance company buy a reins..

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related to observable economic changes: the shift from agriculture to wage employment, the decline of publicly owned Township-and-Village Enterprises, and increased migrant work. Further evidence suggests that as these changes took place at the village level, higher levels of government failed to offset these effects through the tax-and-transfer system, leaving households more exposed to both idiosyncratic a..

The core of the research is to provide the explicit expression for the expected net present values (NPVs) of the double barrier strategy for regular diffusions. Under the so-called bail-out setting, the value of the expected NPVs of an insurance company varies according to the choice of a pair of policies, which consist of dividend payments paid out and capital injections received. In the case of the double barrier strategy, the closed-form expected NPVs are given via the bivariate $q$-scale function. This is accomplished by making use of a perturbation technique, which could lead to the linear equation system. The expression obtained here shall be conducive to addressing the associated divi..

Using IADI Annual Survey data, we find some evidence that deposit insurers with particularly high deposit inflow during the pandemic tend to see their relative fund size decrease. As this refers to annual data, lags in premium collection are unlikely to explain this in full. At a quarterly level, and using weighted average relative fund sizes, we find that – globally – fund sizes have expanded throughout the pandemic, interrupted by a small decrease during 2021Q1 only. Given the overall growth of deposits during the pandemic, this is noteworthy. Over the 12-month period 2020Q2-2021Q2, we find an accumulated relative fund size increase of 2.6%. Europe and Asia witness high growt..

This paper sheds new light on the mortality effect of delaying retirement by investigating the Spanish 1967 pension reform that exogenously changed the early retirement age depending on the date individuals started contributing to the social security system. Those that contributed before January 1st, 1967, maintained the right to voluntarily retire early at age 60, while individuals who started contributing after could not voluntarily claim pension until age 65. Using the Spanish administrative social security data, we find that the reform delayed labor market exit by around half a year and increased the probability that individuals take up disability pensions, partial pensions, and no pensi..

Recent policies aiming to prolong worklives have increased older males’ labor supply. Yet, little is known about their intergenerational effects. Using unique Dutch administrative data covering three consecutive generations, this paper studies the impact of increased grandfathers’ labor supply following a reform in unemployment insurance for persons aged 57.5+ on grandchildren’s educational performance. We find that increased grandfathers’ labor supply increases grandchildren’s test scores in 6th grade. The effect is driven by substitution of grandparents’ informal care by formal childcare.

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 among agents, implying different prevention efforts. We argue that it may also appear in the absence of moral hazard, when agents only differ in riskiness and not in (risk) preferences. We first show that profit-maximization implies that advantageous selection is more likely when markup rates and the elasticity of insurance demand are high. We then move to standard settings satisfying the single-cros..

This paper studies the role of permanent- and transitory earnings variability for lifetime income inequality in Sweden. We fit a permanent–transitory error component model to the autocovariance structure of earnings using administrative data for 2002–2015 and minimum distance estimation. We find that permanent earnings inequality increased during the first decade and that the financial crisis of 2008 temporarily heightened earnings volatility. Using this model, we simulate pensions and study lifetime income inequality. We find that permanent earnings differences generally contributes the most to lifetime income inequality. We conclude that the Swedish pension system provides some insuran..

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was designed to reduce household and lender flood-risk exposure and encourage lending. In this post, which is based on our related study, we show that in certain situations the program actually limits access to credit, particularly for low-income borrowers—an unintended consequence of this well-intentioned program.

The pandemic has highlighted significant gaps in social protection, in particularamong informal workers. With around 60% of workers in informal jobs, many of those most in need of social protection are left behind. The government has attempted to fill this gap with non-contributory benefits, but coverage and benefit levels are low. Better-off formal workers have access to a full range of social protection benefits, involving large-scale public subsidies that widen the gap. Labour informality and social protection coverage are interlinked, as high social contributions are one of the main barriers to formal job creation. Ensuring some universal basic social protection, while simultaneously low..

This paper argues that the value of unemployment insurance (UI) can be decomposed into a liquidity component and an insurance component. While the liquidity component captures the value of relieving the cost to access liquidity during unemployment, the insurance component captures the value of protecting the worker against a potential permanent future income loss. We develop a novel sufficient statistics method to identify each component that requires only the labor supply responses to changes in the potential duration of UI and severance payment and implement it using Spanish administrative data. We find that the liquidity component represents half of the value of UI, while the insurance co..

Advantageous (or propitious) selection occurs when an increase in the premium of an in- surance contract induces high-cost agents to quit, thereby reducing the average cost among remaining buyers. Hemenway (1990) and many subsequent contributions motivate its ad- vent by differences in risk-aversion among agents, implying different prevention efforts. We argue that it may also appear in the absence of moral hazard, when agents only differ in riskiness and not in (risk) preferences. We first show that profit-maximization implies that advantageous selection is more likely when markup rates and the elasticity of insurance demand are high. We then move to standard settings satisfying the single-..

In this paper, we present a new family of bivariate mixed exponential regression models for taking into account the positive correlation between the cost of claims from motor third party liability bodily injury and property damage in a versatile manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate how maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters can be achieved via a novel Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The implementation of two members of this family, namely the bivariate Pareto or, Exponential-Inverse Gamma, and bivariate Exponential-Inverse Gaussian regression models is illustrated by a real data application which involves fitting motor insurance data from a European motor insurance company.

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 would increase federal budget deficits by $155 billion over the 2026–2031 period through the effects of that policy on federal revenues and mandatory spending. Enacting the policy would have a significant effect on primary sources of health insurance coverage, and it would increase the number of people insured.

Cummins, Doherty, and Lo (2002) present a theoretical and empirical analysis of the capacity of the property liability insurance industry in the U.S. to finance catastrophic losses. In their theoretical analysis, they show that a sufficient condition for capacity maximization is for all insurers to hold a net of reinsurance underwriting portfolio that is perfectly correlated with aggregate industry losses. Estimating capacity from insurers’ financial statement data, they find that the U.S. insurance industry could adequately fund a $100 billion event in 1997. As a matter of comparison, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the insurance industry $40 to $55 billion (2005 dollars). Our main objecti..

Abstract This report employs individual-level register data to study the coverage and amounts of voluntary term life insurances, the monetary losses following from the death of a breadwinner, and the life insurance gap arising as the difference of the two. The data include information on the life insurances of Finnish individuals and their individual and household level information between 2018 and 2020. We find that 8 % of the individuals have at least one type of term life insurance in the data. For them the average life insurance is 73 000 €. The take up of life insurances differ between groups, and it is more frequent among working-age, married and higher income individuals. The life i..

During banking crises, regulators must decide between bailouts or liquidations, neither of which are publicly popular. However, making a comprehensive assessment of regulators requires examining all their decisions against their dual objectives of preserving financial stability and discouraging moral hazard. I develop a Bayesian latent class model to assess regulators on these competing objectives and evaluate banking and savings and loan (S&L) regulators during the 1980s crises. I find that the banking authority (FDIC) conformed to these objectives whereas the S&L regulator (FSLIC), which subsequently became insolvent, deviated from them. Timely interventions based on this evaluation could ..

We have estimated the level of Risk Weighted Assets among 30 countries in Europe, in 30 trimesters, using data of the European Banking Authority-EBA of 139 variables. We perform an econometric model using Pooled OLS, Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Panel Data with Random Effects, Weighted Least Squares. We found that Risk Weighted Assets is negatively associated, among others, to the level of NFC loans in mining and quarrying, in public administration and defence, and in financial and insurance activities and positively associated, among others to distribution of NFC loans in human health services and social work activities, in education and the level of net fee and commission income. Further..

In 2019, the Bolivian government began implementation of the Universal Health Insurance (SUS) scheme, with critics claiming the unpreparedness of the healthcare system to provide universal and free services. To date, there is no research that assesses the effects of the reform and to what extent it is providing universal, free services. The objective of this study is to fill this research gap by providing a diagnosis on access to public healthcare services after the SUS’s adoption. In this study, access is operationalized according to a theoretical framework developed by the World Health Organization (2010). The study has been conducted according to a combined method that compares data fro..