NBER Full-Text Search Results for 'tomas philipson white paper'

This paper tests restrictions implied by the canonical theory of insurance under asymmetric information using ideal data that contains the self-perceived and actual mortality risk of individuals, as well as the price and quantity of their life insurance. We report several findings which are hard to reconcile with the canonical theory. First, we find a striking independence of self-perceived risk and the price of insurance. Second, we find strong evidence of the opposite type of non-linear pricing than predicted by theory: the theory predicts that prices rise with quantity, but we find that they fall. Third, we find that risk is negatively correlated with the quantity of insurance purchased although the theory predicts a positive correlation. Fourth, we find that a substantial fraction of individuals hold multiple insurance contracts, which casts doubt on the prediction that unit prices rise with quantity because multiple small contracts dominate a large one in such a case. Lastly, we test the accuracy of the self-perceived risk of the insured through estimating the induced profits they imply. We conclude by discussing the robustness of these results and the questions they raise for future theoretical models.

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. We analyze how such technological change leads to unexpected relationships among income, food prices, and weight. Using individual-level data from 1976 to 1994, we then find that such technology-based reductions in food prices and job-related exercise have had significant impacts on weight across time and populations. In particular, we find that about forty percent of the recent growth in weight seems to be due to agricultural innovation that has lowered food prices, while sixty percent may be due to demand factors such as declining physical activity from technological changes in home and market production.