As America debates the merits of government-provided health insurance, it is important to note that the U.S. government is already the largest insurance provider in the world. For decades, it has used taxpayer funds to support the world's largest health care insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid) as well as the biggest pension and disability insurance system (Social Security). The recent economic crisis has prompted the government to dramatically increase its insurance role by assuming large equity positions in private firms and bailing out troubled mortgages buyers and sellers. Do these public insurance programs improve social welfare? Or does government intervention risk moral hazard and result in inefficient programs that would be better handled by the private sector? In Public Insurance and Private Markets, leading economists critically examine the government's role in insuring against pension fund shortfalls, crop losses, property damage from floods and other natural catastrophes, bank failure, and terrorism. Jeffrey R. Brown and his coauthors argue that government intervention must always be economically justified; that risk adjusted premiums are essential; that the true taxpayer burden for public insurance programs must be recognized; and that private markets are capable of transferring risk without government intervention. Poorly designed government insurance programs result in misallocation of resources, excessive risk-taking, and potentially enormous burdens on current and future taxpayers. Public Insurance and Private Markets offers market-based guidelines for the proper scope of government intervention and the design of public insurance programs guidelines that will benefit the U.S. economy and protect the resources of future generations.

The story of the interplay between finance, freeways, and urban form in the 20th century and their enduring impact on American cities and neighborhoods in the 21st. American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Jeffrey R. Brown, Eric A. Morris, and Brian D. Taylor tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of U.S. urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about. The authors chronicle how the ways that we both raise and spend transportation revenue have shaped our transportation system and the lives of those who use it, from the era before the automobile to the present day. They focus on how the development of one revolutionary type of road-the freeway-was inextricably intertwined with money. With the nation's transportation finance system at a crossroads today, this book sheds light on how we can best fund and plan transportation in the future. The authors draw on these lessons to offer ways forward to pay for transportation more equitably, provide travelers with better mobility, and increase environmental sustainability and urban livability.

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899) was one of the founders of the American art colony at Giverny and was among the earliest American artists to embrace the Impressionist style. He was also one of the first to exhibit his Impressionist paintings in America and helped to popularize the style during his years working in the Boston area in the 1890s. Between 1887 and 1888 he and a handful of his American colleagues began visiting the French village of Giverny, where they met Claude Monet and subsequently explored the new approach to painting that Monet had helped to pioneer. Breck's canvases from this period, loosely brushed and filled with light and color, are a marked departure from his earlier works that are characterized by darker tonalities and tighter brushwork that typified the preferred style of the era. When Breck returned to America in 1892, he applied what he had learned to paintings of the New England landscape and frequently exhibited his work. Inspired by The Mint Museum's 2016 acquisition of John Leslie Breck's canvas Suzanne Hoschede-Monet Sewing, this volume includes approximately 70 of Breck's finest works, drawn from public and private collections. Along with his scenes of Giverny and America, this volume features a selection of paintings from his sojourn in Venice in 1897. Always interested exploring in new ways of seeing the world, Breck had begun to explore aspects of post-Impressionism and Asian aesthetics in the years before his early death, at the age of 39, in 1899. This volume also features up to 36 additional comparative images, including details, photographs, and paintings by Monet and other leading American impressionists including Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Lila Cabot Perry, Childe Hassam, and Arthur Wesley Dow, presented throughout the main essays and chronology and appendices.

The story of the interplay between finance, freeways, and urban form in the 20th century and their enduring impact on American cities and neighborhoods in the 21st. American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Jeffrey R. Brown, Eric A. Morris, and Brian D. Taylor tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of U.S. urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about. The authors chronicle how the ways that we both raise and spend transportation revenue have shaped our transportation system and the lives of those who use it, from the era before the automobile to the present day. They focus on how the development of one revolutionary type of road-the freeway-was inextricably intertwined with money. With the nation's transportation finance system at a crossroads today, this book sheds light on how we can best fund and plan transportation in the future. The authors draw on these lessons to offer ways forward to pay for transportation more equitably, provide travelers with better mobility, and increase environmental sustainability and urban livability.

This paper examines why some employers provide matching contributions to 401(k) plans in company stock and explores the implications of match policy for employee retirement wealth. Unlike stock option grants to non-executives, a firm's decision to match in company stock does not appear to be strongly correlated with cash flow or with measures of the benefits of aligning incentives of employees and employers. Rather, we find evidence that firms are more likely to provide the match in company stock if firm risk is low (i.e. lower stock price volatility and lower bankruptcy risk) and employees are also covered by a defined benefit plan. These findings suggest that firms consider the retirement security of their workers in making the match decision, either because firms want to minimize the risk of violating their fiduciary responsibility or because employees more fully value company stock at companies with lower firm-specific risk. Evidence also indicates that firms may want to match in company stock to boost employee ownership, perhaps to help deter takeovers, or because of the tax advantages for dividends on the company stock match. Simulation results suggest that sufficiently risk-tolerant individuals actually prefer a 401(k) plan at a company with a company stock match to a plan at a company with an unrestricted match, unless the equity premium is reduced substantially.

Annuity insurance products help protect retirees against outliving their incomes. Dramatic advances in life expectancy mean that today's retirees must plan on living into their eighties, their nineties, and even beyond. Longer life expectancies are the symbol of a prosperous society, but this progress also means that some retirees will need to plan conservatively and cut back substantially on their living standards or risk living so long that they exhaust their resources. This book examines the role that life annuities can play in helping people protect themselves against such outcomes. A life annuity is an insurance product that pays out a periodic amount for as long as the annuitant is alive, in exchange for a premium. The book begins with a history of life annuity markets during the twentieth century in the United States and elsewhere. It then explores recent trends in annuity pricing and money's worth, as well as the economic value generated for purchasers of these products. The book explains the potential importance of inflation-protected annuities and stock-market-linked variable annuities in providing more complete retirement security. The concluding chapters examine life annuities in various institutional settings and the tax treatment of annuity products.

The recent financial crisis had a profound effect on both public and private universities, which faced shrinking endowments, declining charitable contributions, and reductions in government support. Universities responded to these stresses in different ways. This volume presents new evidence on the nature of these responses and how the incentives and constraints facing different institutions affected their behavior. The contributors look at the role of endowments in university finances and the interaction of spending policies, asset allocation strategies, and investment opportunities to show how universities' behavior can be modeled using economic principles.