Insurance redlining and the process of discrimination

Insurance redlining and the racially discriminatory consequences of the sale of property insurance have been documented in several cities throughout the United States. In this study teams of “testers”—comparably qualified insurance consumers who differed only in the racial composition of the neighborhood of the homes they sought to insure—contacted three Milwaukee area insurance companies regarding the possibility of purchasing insurance for their homes. Though no blatantly discriminatory behavior was exhibited, agents representing these companies expressed a clear preference to pursue business in white communities and placed additional barriers in the way of testers from nonwhite neighborhoods. These findings parallel changes in other institutional sectors of the housing industry where blatantly discriminatory behavior has generally given way to more subtle forms of bias. Policy recommendations are offered to reduce existing racial disparities in the availability of insurance and to open up housing markets in general for minorities.     

How is Fintech reshaping the traditional financial markets? New evidence from InsurTech and insurance sectors in China

We examine the effect of Fintech on the market structure of traditional financial markets, and focus particularly on InsurTech and the insurance sector. We find that InsurTech has significantly reduced the non-life insurance sector's market concentration but plays a limited role in the life insurance sector's market structure. The results are not driven by potential reverse causality and remain unchanged when we employ an instrumental variables approach and use an alternative supply-side InsurTech index. We further explore the underlying mechanisms and find that, instead of competing directly with insurance companies, Fintech companies provide insurance technologies to traditional insurers and help them lower entry barriers and reduce operating costs. Our paper sheds light on how InsurTech is reshaping traditional insurance sectors, and the results are generalizable to Fintech and financial markets.     

我国保险公司偿付能力影响因素研究

保险公司的偿付能力是理论界、监管机构和保险业内关注的问题,该研究使用2007-2012年975家保险公司的数据,对我国保险公司的偿付能力及影响因素进行了理论分析和实证分析,并利用各种影响因素来解释保险公司偿付能力差别的原因。研究发现,保费增长率、赔付比率同企业偿付能力负相关,保费收入比重、资产净利率和准备金提取率同偿付能力正相关。论文拓展了对偿付能力的研究,并在改变保险公司发展模式和提高保险公司的产品结构,提高保险公司偿付能力等方面提出了相应的政策建议。     

医疗保险的福利效应

本文考察在完全信息的市场经济条件下,医疗保险的进入对于社会总福利的影响。分析表明,保险公司的进入可能使得消费者为医疗服务付出更高的代价,但是会提高医院的利润,总的来说保险公司的进入会提升社会总福利。本文还发现,由于保险公司未考虑其合约设计对医院利润的影响,市场均衡的医疗保险水平仍低于社会最优水平。这些结论有助于澄清相关文献对医疗保险的一些负面看法。     

中外保险中介市场比较分析及政策建议

近几年来，我国保险专业中介机构快速发展，保险中介法律法规体系基本建立，保险中介机构在服务、产品、经营创新方面取得初步成效，业务规模增长较快。但与国外相比，我国保险专业中介在市场占有率、专业化水平、与保险公司战略合作、经营模式、竞争模式等方面有较大差距。必须深化体制改革，推进保险公司社会化、专业化经营，拓展保险中介发展空间；加强专业品质，注重诚信建设，提高中介机构的核心竞争力；实施人才战略，推进对外开放，加速保险专业中介与国际接轨，推进保险中介对外开放；改善监管，加强自律，促进中介机构健康和谐发展，加强中介行业自律。     

发展保险代理公司业务是保险公司的必然选择

保险公司发展代理业务至少在经营成本、代理人收入以及机构设置成本等方面具备积极因素，虽然从市场实际情况看，也有一定的不利因素，但经过认真调查和分析，得出结论：保险公司没有必要因噎废食，因小失大，扼杀这个新兴渠道的发展，关键在于如何认识以及如何采取有效措施防范这些风险或问题。只要保险公司转变观念，并采取有效措施进行制度防范和内部控制，完全可以规避风险。因此对保险公司来说，应从大局和长远出发，大力发展代理业务是其坚定的必然选择。     

The mortality consequences of distinctively black names

Race-specific given names have been linked to a range of negative outcomes in contemporary studies, but little is known about their long-term consequences. Building on recent research which documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman, 2014), we analyze long-term consequences of distinctively racialized names. Using over 3 million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina from 1802 to 1970, we find a robust within-race mortality difference for African American men who had distinctively black names. Having an African American name added more than 1 year of life relative to other African American males. The result is robust to controlling for the age pattern of mortality over time and environmental factors which could drive the mortality relationship. The result is not consistently present for infant and child mortality, however. As much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man was given a black name. Suggestive evidence implies that cultural factors not captured by socioeconomic or human capital measures may be related to the mortality differential.     

Introduction to Articles on Black Women and Work

Black women are one of the hardest working groups in the country. However, hard work is not always properly rewarded. The existence of wage inequities based on race has been shown to exist (Darity The Journal of Human Resources XVII: 72–91 1982), and black women have not been exempt from its implications. In addition, African American women still experience higher unemployment levels than their white female counterparts. In papers examining black women in the nursing profession, their income and earnings volatility, and inequities in their employment, Richard McGregory, Bradley Hardy, and Linda Loubert provide an overview of where black women stand in the U.S. labor market with respect to work and earnings. While these pieces show that African American women have made significant inroads into the American labor market there is still further to go.     

Illustrating Adverse Selection in Health Insurance Markets with a Classroom Game

This paper describes a classroom game that illustrates the effects of asymmetric information and adverse selection in health insurance markets. The first part of this game simulates a market in which buyers can purchase insurance from sellers; in some periods, government regulation prevents sellers from using information about buyer type to determine premiums. The results demonstrate the classic prediction that asymmetric information will result in adverse selection. Here, low-risk buyers will forego the purchase of insurance at a measurable loss of potential earnings. In the second part of the game, sellers and buyers can trade two different types of health insurance policies, one moderate and another generous. Under government-mandated community rating and limits on premium increases, no buyers will purchase the generous plan. Questions are provided to stimulate discussion of the causes and consequences of adverse selection for consumers and insurers and possible solutions for employer- and government-sponsored programs.     

Taking Advantage of an Untapped Pool: Assessing the Success of African American Head Coaches in the National Football League

Noting that only five African American coaches had been hired to lead National Football League (NFL) teams from 1989–2002, Madden (J of Sports Econ, 5(1):6–19 2004) found that teams coached by African Americans in the NFL outperformed their counterparts in the regular season but were significantly below average in the playoffs. This analysis, with data that includes nine African American coaches and extends through 2007, reconfirms Madden’s finding that African American head coaches outperform their rivals in the regular season, but also finds that African American coaches no longer suffer from poor playoff performance. Using fixed effects pooled cross section time series models, this analysis confirms that teams with African American head coaches can expect more wins in the regular season than their peers, other things equal. However, there is some evidence that as the pool of African American coaching talent diminishes from additional hires their extraordinary performance may be slightly regressing. The playoff analysis shows that that when controlling for seeding, organizational strength and regular season wins, African American coaches perform at the same level as their counterparts.

混合型巨灾风险证券化产品的成本分析

如何分散和转移巨灾风险,实现巨灾风险管理的有效性已成为当今的重要课题。论文对50家样本中的5家保险公司进行了成本分析,最后得出保险公司无论是采用传统的再保险方式或新型的巨灾期权方式都能够达到转移风险的目的,并且比仅补充资本金的方式更节约成本,风险厌恶系数越小的保险公司节约成本的效果更明显。另外,还得出最好的混合融资方式很大程度上取决于保险公司风险暴露与巨灾指数相关性的大小。一些保险公司能够通过使用巨灾期权很大程度上降低巨灾保险的融资成本。     

Residential location and the earnings of African American women

In comparing the earnings of African American women to three reference groups—white women, African American men, and white men—three principal findings emerge. First, African American women residing in the suburbs are worse off than any other suburban group. Second, central city African American women are worse off than any other group of central city residents. Third, while central city residence imposes a statistically significant earnings penalty on men of both races, no such penalty is found for African American or white women. Therefore, African American women will enjoy no earnings advantage if they move to the suburbs. This finding underscores the importance of including women in studies of residential location and the socioeconomic status of African Americans. A narrow focus on male data to inform policy is clearly insufficient.     

Cultural dimensions of marketing strategies

Conclusion Culture marketing involves no new principles not found in marketing to the dominant superculture. It deserves special attention, however, because of the growing importance of subcultural markets such as the $64 billion United States market of 24 million black consumers, or of the massive global Third World market. It deserves special attention also because of the threat of alienation that may accrue from failure to communicate with consumers “in their own language.”     

Race,Quality of Care and Patient Outcomes: What Can We Learn from the Department of Veterans Affairs?

The large and persistent differences in health outcomes between African Americans and whites have sometimes been attributed to differences in the quality of the facilities in which they receive care. A large body of literature documents systematically worse performance by facilities which serve a larger share of black patients. However, these estimates may be biased by unobserved variables which correlate with the racial profile of the clinic and also affect outcomes. This paper uses a unique dataset from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs system to examine the relationship between the quality of health care and the racial profile of the patient population in an equal-access health care system. An instrumental variable is used to overcome the omitted variable bias in the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Both the OLS and IV estimates show that increasing the proportion of visits by African–American patients results in improved outcomes for all patients treated at the clinic. The OLS results significantly underestimate the effect of increasing the proportion of black patients. Holding the overall clinic load constant and adding one hundred outpatient visits by African Americans in a year would result in a 0.5 percentage point decrease in 1-year mortality for the average patient in the clinic. Thus, contrary to results from the private health care sector, increasing clinic racial integration in an equal access system would benefit all patients.     

Gatekeeper incentives and demand inducement: An empirical analysis of care managers in the Japanese long-term care insurance program

This study analyzes the incentives and supplier-induced demand of care managers, who are intermediaries between consumers and service providers in the Japanese social insurance program for long-term care. Care managers can be considered as pure gatekeepers, in that their function is limited to referral people to specialists and they themselves do not provide care. Care managers are rewarded by capitation, which is considered as a cost-effective payment mechanism for insurers. However, many care managers actually work for firms that also operate as service providers. Service providers are rewarded by a fee-for-service payment and can have a motivation to induce excess consumer demand. The violation of the neutrality of care managers might result in a financial burden on social insurance. In this study, we empirically test whether there is a positive correlation between care manager density and care costs, which might imply the existence of supplier-induced demand. Our results show a positive correlation, particularly in the case of care managers who work for firms that jointly operate in service provision sectors. Based on these results, we conduct a quantitative analysis, and show that the demand induced by care managers might produce a considerable financial burden on social insurance.     

Consumer demand by Black Americans

This article investigates the consumption patterns of black Americans for five different commodity groups: food, housing, clothing, health care, and transportation. The black consumer’s demand for these products is hypothesized as describable by the linear expenditure system. The system allows the investigation of changing relative commodity prices and income. The system also establishes a basic consumption bundle as an estimable parameter of the system. The basic bundle allows for changes in composition due to increased product familiarity, habit formation, and emulation by black consumers. Product familiarity and habit-formation play a role in determining the black consumer’s demand for the commodities food, housing, and clothing. This demand is also partially determined by the consumer’s “emulation” of consumption standards established by society in general. The article is not a comparison study of black-white differences in consumer behavior; however, the possible existence of an emulation effect in black consumer behavior suggests an interrelation of black-white consumer welfare which might fruitfully be studied by future researchers.     

Black Progress Through Business Improvement: Two Articles by Joseph R. Houchins, 1900-1989

In the spirit of further expanding the heretofore unsung contributions of African American economists, we present two unpublished works from the 1930s of Joseph Roosevelt Houchins. They focus on Black business development and strategy. Biographical information and historical context for Houchins’s life experiences during the twentieth century are included in an introduction. Houchins was a member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet, a leader of the Division of Negro Affairs in the U.S. Department of Commerce, and a chair and professor of economics at Howard University. These two writings reflect a strategic effort to strengthen the efficiency and impact of Black business as an engine of Black progress. The first document presented here analyzes the high failure rate of Black-owned insurance companies, a mainstay of Black business especially in the 1920s and 30s. Houchins determined that their failure was due to several factors: lack of business knowledge; lack of access to capital; a tendency towards over-expenditure on office furnishings; and an over-identification with the clients, paying unjustified claims and failing to collect premiums on policies. The second document reports the results of a national survey that Houchins conducted to create a complete listing of Black chambers of commerce that could be used for intra-racial communication and mutual support. Both documents resonate today as the struggle for Black progress continues.     

论中国首套重大疾病经验发生率表的影响

随着医疗技术的进步,重疾康复率不断提升,与此同时,医疗费用也在迅速上升,健康保险里的重疾险成为了发达地区消费者的首选保障手段。长期以来,我国一直没有自己的疾病发生率表,重疾险产品的定价和法定准备金评估,主要依靠再保险公司提供的国外发生率数据。但这种情况下,定价与评估的准确性、科学性和适用性都难以保证,这无疑制约了重大疾病保险的发展。2013年11月,我国首套重大疾病经验发生率表发布。首套重大疾病发生率表的发布对我国重大疾病保险发展和重大疾病保险的主要参与者会产生哪些影响?     

Lynchings,labour, and cotton in the US south: A reappraisal of Tolnay and Beck

I examine lynchings of African Americans in the US South from 1882 to 1930, more than twenty years after Tolnay and Beck’s (1995) seminal work. The authors claim that lynchings were due to economic competition between African American and white cotton workers. I confirm much of their original hypothesis with new data and techniques, and expand upon it, finding that another explanation, Williamson’s (1997) psychosexual one, might complement the economic one. I also discover that, in line with an economic competition framework, lynchings predict more black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages.     

The Plight of African American Women: Employed and Unemployed

Understanding employment for African American women through the lens of neoclassical economics may not be best to help understand their plight. Their pay and the available employment has not been equal to that of men and even more so, African American women have lower paying jobs compared to their white counterparts, despite their achievement of higher levels of education. This paper looks at unemployment rates across the nation and then centers the discussion on black women in the context of the disparities over the past three decades. It combines the types of employment and wages that they have endured in context to white women during the same period of time. It uses Geographical Information Systems to underscore the concentration of income and race and the types of employment in those areas. It then provides some policy recommendations for the future.