A comprehensive guide designed to help consumers understand the American health insurance system so that they can obtain the benefits to which they are entitled. Epstein explains the ins and outs of both new and traditional health insurance plans, including traditional individual and group policies, HMOs and other types of managed care plans, self-funded plans, Medicare, Medicare HMOs, Medigap, long-term care, COBRA, CHAMPUS, and Medical Savings Accounts.

Written by a nationally syndicated columnist, this useful volume also deals with special health insurance issues related to children, adults with special needs, and individuals who may need long-term care. In addition, Epstein provides valuable information for individuals who are in the process of changing jobs or making changes in their marital or family status, choosing a health insurance plan, or arranging long-term care--including placement in a nursing home or an assisted-living facility--for an aging parent. The book has a practical focus with a variety of tables and worksheets to help consumers establish a system for preventing health insurance problems, and for dealing with any health insurance problems that may arise. It also contains answers to common questions about health insurance, and provides a list of organizations that offer detailed information and advice in regard to specific health insurance problems.

The growth of Islamic finance today is undeniable given its services, product innovation, performance and achievements, with the Islamic insurance market being no exception; it has retained global market recognition in a parallel platform as Islamic finance moves forward. There is much written regarding the Islamic insurance system, but rarely do researchers present the various Islamic insurance products and their structures in one collective place. This book is a timely addition in meeting contemporary market demands by providing a much-needed overview of the Islamic insurance products and their Shari'ah compliant structures. This book would be of interest to academics, researchers, students and professionals who are seeking to understand the products offered.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide is a self-improvement guide that provides ordinary people with the tools to become financially savvy quickly and successfully. Identifying the common mistakes people make when dealing with their finances, the guide sets out how to rectify them. It also highlights how one can achieve financial independence by cutting back on some expenses, like luxury cars, and the benefits of starting to save as early as possible.

The book also explains in easy-to-understand terms how to draw up and stick to a budget; make shrewd investments in various investment vehicles; consolidate and eliminate debt; draw up a will; get the most out of short-term and life insurance; and save enough money to retire.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide serves as a wake-up call to stop wasting money and start investing for a financially secure future. A must-read for anyone who wants to not only improve their finances, but also their life in general.

The digital transformation of finance and banking enables traditional services to be delivered in a more effective and efficient way but, at the same time, presents crucial issues such as fast growing new asset classes, new currencies, datafication and data privacy, algorithmization of law and regulation and, last but not least, new models of financial crime. This book approaches the evolution of digital finance from a business perspective and in a holistic way, providing cutting-edge knowledge of how the digital financial system works in its three main domains: banking, insurance and capital markets. It offers a bird's eye view of the major issues and developments in these individual sectors. The book begins by examining the wider framework of the subsequent analysis and over the next three parts, discusses the opportunities, risks and challenges facing the digitalization of these individual financial subsectors, highlighting the similarities and differences in their digitalization agenda, as well as the existing linkages and dependencies among them. The book clarifies the strategic issues facing the development of digital finance in these major subsectors over the coming years. The book has three key messages: that digital transformation changes fundamentally the way financial businesses operate; that individual trades have their own digitalization agenda; and that the State with its regulatory power and central banking and money has a particularly important role to play. It will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of finance and banking, as well as policymakers wishing to understand the values and limitations of new forms of digital money.

Challenges destabilize the norm and create distresses and disruptions in, for example, the culture, the technology, regulations, the environmental, etc. that influence the pace of finance and economic activities. This book is a collection of 13 chapters and studies about Insurance and Risk management in response to disruptions caused by social, economic, and environmental challenges to try and stabilize the economy in an effort to ensure sustainability. Insurance and Risk Management for Disruptions in Social, Economic and Environmental Systems brings together studies from scholars, researchers and professionals with different disciplinary backgrounds to highlight discuss and exchange ideas on these challenges, which may seem a danger, but offer prospects for economic and business development. Books in the Emerald Studies In Finance, Insurance, And Risk Management series collect quantitative and qualitative studies in areas relating to finance, insurance, and risk management. Subjects of interest may include banking, accounting, auditing, compliance, sustainability, behaviour, management, and business economics.

The cooperation and contamination among mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance are improving the research on these topics and producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume presents new ideas in the form of four- to six-page papers presented at the International Conference MAF2022 - Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference, to which this book is related, was organized in a hybrid form by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno, with the partnership of the Department of Economics of Ca Foscari University of Venice, and was held from 20 to 22 April 2022 in Salerno (Italy) MAF2022 is the tenth edition of an international biennial series of scientific meetings, started in 2004 on the initiative of the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno. It has established itself internationally with gradual and continuous growth and scientific enrichment. The effectiveness of this idea has been proven by the wide participation in all the editions, which have been held in Salerno (2004, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2022), Venice (2008, 2012 and 2020 online), Paris (2016) and Madrid (2018). This book covers a wide variety of subjects: artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance and insurance, behavioural finance, credit risk methods and models, dynamic optimization in finance, financial data analytics, forecasting dynamics of actuarial and financial phenomena, foreign exchange markets, insurance models, interest rate models, longevity risk, models and methods for financial time series analysis, multivariate techniques for financial markets analysis, pension systems, portfolio selection and management, real-world finance, risk analysis and management, trading systems, and others. This volume is a valuable resource for academics, PhD students, practitioners, professionals and researchers. Moreover, it is also of interest to other readers with quantitative background knowledge.

Insurance Planning Models: Price Competition and Regulation of Financial Stability is an exciting new book that takes readers inside the secrets of internal organization of the modern general insurance business. Many people know that it is subject to intensive state regulation, whereby the purpose is to maintain long-term efficiency, honesty, security and stability in the interest and for the protection of policyholders. However, except for knowing that the insurance system is regulated by intensive calculations, that the insurance companies have different positions on the market, that they pursue different goals and even compete with each other, and that one of the tools of this competition is the policy price, not so many people know how to achieve these deserving goals.In developing quantitative recommendations and directives to competing insurers, regulators rely on certain models. In the 1900s, such models were proposed. They were useful for an insight into the probabilistic nature of the insurance process, but not for direct application to practically meaningful problems of insurance regulation. This book is your guide to the rigorously constructed long-term dynamic models with the aim to improve regulatory methods and develop quantitative recommendations using both analytical calculations and computer simulation. It is addressed to a wide range of readers, including interested policyholders, economists whose interest lies in insurance management and regulation, and mathematicians wishing to expand the scope of application for their knowledge.This book is devoted to certain issues that are either not sufficiently presented, or even absent in the literature. It is an attempt to penetrate from the standpoint of mathematical modeling into the goals which face insurance regulators and contending company managers for preventing insolvencies, or even crises pertinent to badly regulated complex reflexive systems.It offers rigorous probabilistic models of long-term insurance business based on the laws of mass phenomena. They mitigate deficiencies of oversimplified risk models. The book presents advances in probabilistic techniques designed to seek quantitative, rather than qualitative, directives and recommendations regarding safe control aiming to achieve different business goals.

Malta is the only country in the European Union, and one of only six countries in the world, that has not had a banking crisis since the 1970s. Despite its lack of raw materials, Malta currently has one of the lowest rates of unemployment and inflation in the EU, as well as a positive GDP. Yet there are only a few studies on the development of the industry that contributes most to its economy, the financial services industry. Drawing upon empirical findings, archival research, and interviews, Zammit, Spiteri, and Grima fill a major gap in the literature by delivering a study of the development of the Maltese insurance industry. The authors collect literature and insights from prominent figureheads in order to outline the history of this major sector of the Maltese economy, tracing its roots back to the earliest inhabitants of the island, through to the expansion of its maritime trade, and working right up to the present with the emergence of more complex and sophisticated insurance services and products. The success of Malta's specific risk-management practices, generally characterized by risk-avoidance and prudence, is shown to have implications beyond Maltese financial policy and regulatory development: it offers concrete guidance from a small-scale "laboratory" for the complex policy and development decisions of larger nations. This study is of interest to students and academics of insurance, risk management, and financial services, and it offers food for thought and guidance to practitioners and policy makers.

The debate between the proponents of "classical" and "Bayesian" statistica} methods continues unabated. It is not the purpose of the text to resolve those issues but rather to demonstrate that within the realm of actuarial science there are a number of problems that are particularly suited for Bayesian analysis. This has been apparent to actuaries for a long time, but the lack of adequate computing power and appropriate algorithms had led to the use of various approximations. The two greatest advantages to the actuary of the Bayesian approach are that the method is independent of the model and that interval estimates are as easy to obtain as point estimates. The former attribute means that once one learns how to analyze one problem, the solution to similar, but more complex, problems will be no more difficult. The second one takes on added significance as the actuary of today is expected to provide evidence concerning the quality of any estimates. While the examples are all actuarial in nature, the methods discussed are applicable to any structured estimation problem. In particular, statisticians will recognize that the basic credibility problem has the same setting as the random effects model from analysis of variance.

Digital Asset Valuation and Cyber Risk Measurement: Principles of Cybernomics is a book about the future of risk and the future of value. It examines the indispensable role of economic modeling in the future of digitization, thus providing industry professionals with the tools they need to optimize the management of financial risks associated with this megatrend. The book addresses three problem areas: the valuation of digital assets, measurement of risk exposures of digital valuables, and economic modeling for the management of such risks. Employing a pair of novel cyber risk measurement units, bitmort and hekla, the book covers areas of value, risk, control, and return, each of which are viewed from the perspective of entity (e.g., individual, organization, business), portfolio (e.g., industry sector, nation-state), and global ramifications. Establishing adequate, holistic, and statistically robust data points on the entity, portfolio, and global levels for the development of a cybernomics databank is essential for the resilience of our shared digital future. This book also argues existing economic value theories no longer apply to the digital era due to the unique characteristics of digital assets. It introduces six laws of digital theory of value, with the aim to adapt economic value theories to the digital and machine era.

The u.s. government bulks large in the nation's financial markets. The huge volume of government-issued and -sponsored debt affects the pricing and volume ofprivate debt and, consequently, resource allocation between competing alternatives. What is often not fully appreciated is the substantial influence the federal government wields overresource allocation through its provisionofcreditandrisk-bearing services to the private economy. Because peopleand firms generally seekto avoid risk, atsomeprice they are willing to pay another party to assume the risk they would otherwise face. Insurance companies are a class of private-sector firms one commonly thinks of as providing these services. As the federal government has expanded its presence in the U.S. economy during this century, it has increasingly developed programs aimed at bearing risks that the private sector either would not take on at any price, or would take on but atapricethoughtto besogreatthatmostpotentialbeneficiarieswouldnotpurchase the coverage. Today, roughly three-fifths of all nonfederal credit outstanding is 1 assisted by some form of federal program. The federal government provides insurance of many private pension plans through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, subsidizesand implicitly guarantees the liabilitiesofseveral agencies dominating secondary loan markets (for example, the Federal National Mortgage Association, Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and Student Loan Mar ketingAssociation), andeithermakesdirectloansorguaranteesprivatelygenerated loans through a varietyofcreditprograms to farmers, exporters, home purchasers, and others."

The only student textbook covering this frequently-taught subject Fully updated new edition includes updates in case law and the ongoing impact of the Insurance Act 2015 and a revised chapter on smart contracts to include discussion of Blockchain First two editions extremely well received and adopted by the market

There is increasing pressure for all of us to take responsibility for our own financial security and wellbeing, but we often overlook how the benefits that come with a job can help us do that. Essential Personal Finance: A Practical Guide for Employees focuses on these valuable work benefits and shows how you can build on this important foundation to achieve financial security and your life goals. This unique book explores how making effective and practical use of these work benefits (such as pension scheme, life cover, sick pay, cheap loans, savings schemes and even financial coaching), means facing up to the behavioural biases we are all plagued with. Given that these can get in the way of even the best intentions, Essential Personal Finance tackles these biases head-on with practical ideas and tips for overcoming or harnessing them for good, and will help you to develop a positive and fruitful relationship with your money. With financial stress being a major cause of absenteeism and sick leave, low morale and lost productivity, the advice in this book also offers employers enormous benefits. By empowering employees through financial education and financial awareness, progressive employers will help them feel more in control of their lives, and experience less stress, resulting in higher morale and productivity. Offering a distinctive approach which combines academic insight with practical financial wisdom and tools, this is a must-have book for all employees. It will help you make the most of everything your job has to offer so you can worry less about money and live life to the full.

The research project leading to this book was initiated in the fall of 1979 when the American Council of Life Insurance (ACLI) contacted Dan McGill, chairman of the Wharton School Insurance Department, about conducting a study on risk classification in life insurance. The ACLI was concerned about legislative and judicial activity in this area and its potential effects on the life insurance industry. A meeting was held at the ACLI offices in Washington, D.C., between several members of the ACLI staff and Dan McGill and David Cummins representing the Wharton School insurance department. An agreement was reached that a study would be conducted at Wharton dealing with issues in risk classification. Although the staff of the ACLI suggested directions the study might take, it was agreed that the design and execution of the study would be solely under the control of the researchers. The researchers also retained unrestricted publication rights in the results of the study. This agreement has been honored by the ACLI during the course of the project.

Corporate scandals at the beginning of the 2000s and the recent global financial crisis have renewed the attention of academics, regulators and practitioners to agency problems and possible solutions in the financial sector. Since that time, much thought has been given to new regulations and international corporate governance standards, in an attempt to guarantee prudent and sound financial management. While much of this thought has been focussed on the banking sector, Corporate Governance in the European Insurance Industry provides a unique perspective on the subject, focusing on the insurance industry and asking some important theoretical and practical questions. Are insurance companies systemically relevant, and does the existing regulation provide adequate protection for customers and guarantee financial stability? Is regulatory intervention consistent with economic and financial theories? And crucially, is this intervention consistent with empirical evidence of the behaviour and performance of insurance companies? The first part of this book provides the reader with a comprehensive review of current academic studies on the topic; the second part moves on to examine the regulation of corporate governance and its recent evolution after the global financial crisis. Within a context of vivid debate in the financial services industry, the issues explored in this book will be of value to anyone with an interest in insurance corporate governance and regulation. It is also a key source of research for academics in insurance and finance, as well as PhD students and post-graduate students in relevant subjects.

From the bestselling author of Making money out of property in South Africa now comes 10 simple steps to property wealth, which distils, in a nutshell, all the tips and strategies, as well as all the most important and dif?cult lessons, the author has learnt over the course of his own career as a property investor. Lee points out the ‘good, the bad and the ugly’ of property investing, and shares with readers some very personal experiences, illustrating in an informative, accessible manner how to make solid investment decisions in a volatile property market. Lee believes that property is the cornerstone of wealth creation, and the 10 simple steps outlined in this book are designed to put readers on the right path to wealth creation through property.

In excess of loss reinsurance, the reinsurer covers the amount of a loss exceeding the policy's deductible but not piercing its cover limit. Accordingly, a policy's quantitative scope of cover is significantly affected by the parties' agreement of a deductible and a cover limit. Yet, the examination of whether a loss has exceeded deductible or cover limit necessitates an educated understanding of what constitutes one loss. In so-called aggregation clauses, the parties to (re-)insurance contracts regularly provide that multiple individual losses are to be added together for presenting one loss to the reinsurer when they arise from the same event, occurrence, catastrophe, cause or accident. Aggregation mechanisms are one of the core instruments for structuring reinsurance contracts. This book systematically examines each element of an aggregation mechanism, tracing the inconsistent usage of aggregation language in the markets and scrutinizing the tests developed by courts and arbitral tribunals. In doing so, it seeks to support insurers, reinsurers, brokers and lawyers in drafting aggregation clauses and in settling claims. Focusing on an analysis of primary sources, particularly judicial decisions, the book interprets each judicial decision to describe a system of inter-related rules, collating, organising and describing the English law of aggregation as applied by the courts and arbitral tribunals. It further draws a comparison between the English position and the corresponding rules in the Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law (PRICL).

Insurance Market Integration in the European Union offers an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of insurance market integration and measures the degrees of this integration. It examines the operation of the EU single financial market and, against this backdrop, the regulation relating to the insurance market. In addition, the book focuses on the specificity and determinants of international insurance market development and the issues with assimilation set against other financial market segments such as money market, credit-deposit and bond and equity. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of insurance market integration on an international scale. The authors propose a unique approach to the subject in the context of the EU and particularly in relation to the European area. They also apply new measures of insurance market integration in the EU in practice through the use of statistical data and implementation of econometric modeling. Further, they investigate how the financial and fiscal crisis has affected the insurance market in EU countries and the impact of European Central Bank monetary policy on the degrees of integration in the European area during and after the financial crisis. This book will find an audience among academics and researchers in the fields of international economics and finance and applied, financial and growth economics.

Five years ago the world lost one of its most prolific insurance scholars, Dr. Robert I. Mehr. His death in 1988 signalled the passing of not only a gifted writer and researcher, but also a pioneering teacher, mentor, and friend. The essays compiled within this volume are intended as an appropriate tribute to this occasionally outrageous individual who touched the lives of so many within the insurance community. Bob Mehr was a teacher who expected and demanded nothing less than perfect scholarship and flawless, efficient writing. Among alumni of the University of lllinois insurance doctoral program, stories still abound of late night and early morning sessions in which students and professor painstakingly debated precise words and phrases for dissertations, journal articles, and textbooks. Bob's respect for language was both immense and contagious, if at times more than a little compulsive. He joked that he could not read letters or novels without pencil in hand for editing. Bob's respect for his doctoral students was equally evident. The confidence he displayed in his students' abilities was sometimes startling, but "competence assumed" often begot "competence in fact." The accomplishments and records amassed by the many who studied with Bob Mehr are impressive and ongoing. On the dedication page in his final textbook, Fundamentals of Insurance, Bob spoke of his affection for those he called his "academic progeny" and wished them happiness as they build their own academic families.

For people interested in risk management, medical activity represents a stimulating field of study and thought. On the one hand, progress in medical knowledge and technology tends to reduce the risks to survival that individuals would face in the absence of appropriate diagnostic or therapeutic instruments. On the other hand, new medical technologies simultaneously create their own specific risks, sometimes simply because their effects are less well-known than those of established ones. In a sense any medical progress simultaneously generates new risks while destroying old ones. Moreover, unlike many financial risks that can be either divided or transferred to others (e.g. through diversification, insurance or social security) the personal aspects of medical risks are by essence indivisible and non-transferable. As a result, they are in a sense more threatening than financial risks for risk averse patients. These two facts explain and justify the growing interest in risk economics for the fields of medical decision making and health economics.

In Risk and Medical Decision Making, part 1 is developed inside the expected utility (E-U) model and analyses how comorbidity risks affect the well-known "test-treatment" thresholds. Part 2 is devoted to a specific non E-U model with the same purpose: how would one define a threshold in this context and how would one value a diagnostic test? In each of these two parts both diagnostic and therapeutic risks are considered.

This Palgrave Pivot assesses the impact of the regulatory framework for derivatives built post-crisis and examines its ambition to centralize and minimize credit risk, enhance transparency, and regain control. Zelenko delves into the powerful destabilizing forces exerted by derivatives markets in the global financial meltdown of 2008. Recapping the evolution in markets and counterparty risk management, as well as key aspects of regulation and their impact, this book aims to give readers the big picture and foster a deep understanding of the role of derivatives markets in the financial crisis. This practical angle will give useful keys to end-users and their risk managers, as they are faced with a new, complex, and changing environment. Additionally, this book conducts a comprehensive analysis of the new metrics the market has created to model, price, and manage credit risk, such as the Credit Value Adjustment (CVA), the Debt Value Adjustment (DVA), or the Funding Value Adjustment (FVA), and takes full stock of a domain that is still in rapid evolution. This volume covers the concepts, methods, and approaches taken by banks to manage counterparty credit risk in their derivatives activities in the new post-crisis market and regulatory environment, and it aims to highlight what is practical and effective today.

The financing of graduate medical education is likely to change significantly in the near future as third party payers are already pressuring hospitals to discontinue paying for graduate medical education through patient care. The Medicare System of Prospective Payment Implications for Medical Education and Practice isolates significant implications of prospective payment systems, and deals with each one in detail. Besides providing a theoretical base, it identifies various alternatives and provides guidelines for dealing with them.

Examining the law of export credit insurance and export credit guarantees, this book clarifies the legal nature of ECI and ECGs as insurance and guarantees respectively by comparing their legal characteristics regarding contract formation process, terms and conditions, duty of fair presentation, claim handling process and subrogation and recoveries. It further explores why some export credit agencies provide export credit guarantees in addition to export credit insurance, notwithstanding that an ECG is a more client-friendly product and easier than ECI for banks to use. Analysing the legal principles applicable to export credit insurance and export credit guarantees reflected by English case authorities and statutory law, the book is a doctrinal study informed by substantive empirical research. It studies a large number of export credit insurance and export credit guarantee contractual terms, to propose several model clauses and scrutinise the influences of the Insurance Act 2015 on ECI. This book is an important reference for students, academics and practitioners in the field of commercial and insurance law. In particular, it seeks to provide guidelines for all potential parties who wish to arrange an ECI/ECG transaction, including export credit agencies, private credit insurers, brokers, banks, exporters and buyers, to correctly identify and choose the suitable cover.

This open access book collects expert contributions on actuarial modelling and related topics, from machine learning to legal aspects, and reflects on possible insurance designs during an epidemic/pandemic. Starting by considering the impulse given by COVID-19 to the insurance industry and to actuarial research, the text covers compartment models, mortality changes during a pandemic, risk-sharing in the presence of low probability events, group testing, compositional data analysis for detecting data inconsistencies, behaviouristic aspects in fighting a pandemic, and insurers' legal problems, amongst others. Concluding with an essay by a practicing actuary on the applicability of the methods proposed, this interdisciplinary book is aimed at actuaries as well as readers with a background in mathematics, economics, statistics, finance, epidemiology, or sociology.

This textbook introduces readers to the most relevant aspects of Investment Evaluation in the context of enterprise evaluation. It utilises a clear didactic concept and concisely presents representative cases, supported by calculations and their step-by-step, Excel-based solutions. In addition, the book analyses the respective benefits of the calculation models discussed from a management standpoint.