The emergence of COVID-19 has resulted in a notable rise in mortality rates, consequently affecting various sectors, including the insurance industry. This paper analyzes the reflections of a sudden increase in mortality rates on the financial performance of a survival benefit scenario under the International Financial Reporting Standard 17. For this purpose, we thoroughly examined a single insurance scenario under four different states by modifying the interest and jump elements. We use Poisson-log bilinear Lee–Carter and Vasicek models for mortality and stochastic interest rate, respectively. Integrating the mortality model with a jump model that incorporates COVID-19 deaths we constructed a temporary mortality jump model. As a result, the temporary mortality jump model reflects the effects of the pandemic more realistically. We observe that even in this case mortality has a minor impact, whereas interest rates significantly still affect the financial position and performance of insurance companies.

Identifying the impact of remittances on household members remaining behind is difficult due to selection into migration. In this paper, we exploit an unexpected embargo on Qatar, the second major destination among Nepali migrants. Using longitudinal data on about 1,500 Nepali households with migrants prior to the embargo, we assess how this shock translates into changes in remittances and development outcomes. We find a 56% reduction in remittances for households with a migrant in Qatar. At least in the months immediately after the shock, such a fall in remittances does not seem to translate into recipient household's welfare. However, we cannot exclude that such effect might materialize in the medium run. That is particularly true for poor and credit-constrained households, especially vulnerable to the remittance windfall and lacking the ability to move their migrants or other household members to other destinations.

Recent technological advancements have facilitated alternative work arrangements. This paper investigates how flextime and working from home (WfH) relate to workers’ well-being using longitudinal data drawn from the Understanding Society study for the UK. It accounts for individual, job, and family characteristics while controlling for individual fixed effects. Additionally, it employs the Oster test to examine the potential influence of unobserved variables. Results show that men experience improved job satisfaction and mental health with flextime arrangements, while women predominantly benefit in terms of job satisfaction. Additionally, women adopting remote work report heightened satisfaction with job and life, and better mental health, whereas men primarily report greater job satisfaction. Interestingly, flextime effects are stronger for men, while WfH is more beneficial for women. Some heterogeneous effects are also found by parental status, age, and income groups.

I contribute to the literature on the growth of public spending in Western economies with a novel mechanism that ties it to the marketization process, i.e. the substitution of home with market production. I argue that a key contributor to the expansion of social spending is the replacement of family-based transfers with public pensions and other public transfer programs. I provide empirical support for this hypothesis by establishing the long-run relationship between government size and marketization, alongside other established determinants of government spending, in a panel of Western economies. I then illustrate a potential mechanism behind the results with a theoretical model in which, as a result of the productivity advantage of the market over the home sector, family-based intergenerational transfers decline unexpectedly, providing a rationale for government intervention in the form of public pensions with a poverty relief component.

We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with higher attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals tend to convey their cultural traits to their children. As a consequence, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across boundaries and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive cultural traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born to parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show higher religiosity.

This study examines disparities in health and nutrition among native and Syrian refugee children in Turkey. To understand the need for targeted programs addressing child well-being among the refugee population, we analyze the Turkey Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS) – which provides representative data for a large refugee and native population. We find no evidence of a difference in infant or child mortality between refugee children born in Turkey and native children. However, refugee infants born in Turkey have lower birthweight and age-adjusted weight and height than native infants. When we account for a rich set of birth and socioeconomic characteristics that display substantial differences between natives and refugees, the gaps in birthweight and age-adjusted height persist, but the gap in age-adjusted weight disappears. Moreover, the remaining gaps in birthweight and anthropometric outcomes are limited to the lower end of the distribution. The observed gaps are even larger for refugee infants born before migrating to Turkey, suggesting that the remaining deficits reflect conditions in the source country before migration rather than deficits in access to health services within Turkey. Finally, comparing children by the country of their first trimester, we find evidence of the detrimental effects of stress exposure during pregnancy.

Individuals who serve in the military substitute work experience for post-secondary educational attainment after high school, leading to large educational attainment gaps between new veterans and observably similar nonveterans. Little is known about the evolution of these gaps by age and across cohorts. We investigate the life-cycle attainment of veterans relative to nonveterans using a synthetic panel data approach. Following five multiyear birth cohorts we find that, on average, veterans close a 20-percentage point gap in attainment of a bachelor's or greater over time and significantly outpace observably similar nonveterans in attainment of an associate's degree. Female and minority veterans exceeded the attainment of similar nonveterans over time, and more recent birth cohorts began with larger gaps but closed them at younger ages due to increasing levels of both enrollment and enrollment intensity. Our findings highlight the important role of military service in facilitating social mobility through educational attainment.

We are the first to study how the resources freed up when a child, child-in-law, or grandchild moves out of a household are reallocated, taking into account the age of the leaver. Using the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we document that, on average, the remaining household members save part of the resources freed up by the leaver and consume another part. Differentiating the leavers by age, we find that after the departure of a member of the younger generation aged 0–24, the remaining household members save the resources freed up by the leaver. However, if the leaver is above 24, they spend the freed-up resources. Our results are robust to the use of different specifications, estimation methods, and consumption aggregates. Finally, we observe that remittances directed toward non-resident offspring do not increase after the departure of a member of the younger generation.

Since 2006, Rwanda has experienced a substantial rise in the facility-based delivery (FBD) rate, attributed to various health initiatives. This paper investigates the impact of multiple health reforms on maternal service utilization and neonatal mortality rates. Employing a difference-in-differences framework utilizing geographical variation in the baseline FBD rate, our estimates indicate a 10–17 percentage point increase in FBD and a 0.15–0.18 times increase in the number of antenatal care visits. While our analysis indicates some evidence of a reduction in neonatal mortality rates, the findings are inconclusive. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the effect of the reforms on neonatal mortality rates was weakly intensified for those residing near district hospitals providing care for complicated pregnancies.

Fertility control strategies became widespread in rural Spain through the twentieth century: a significant number of parents decided to reduce their marital fertility once the advantages of control strategies became widely known. This paper explores the impact of those practices on children through a comparative study of the heights and occupations of grandparents, parents, and children. We analyze more than 1,200 individuals from three different generations born between 1835 and 1959 in 14 rural Spanish villages, studying whether the advantages associated with fertility control were maintained over time favoring a better family status or whether they were diluted in the next generation. The largest increases in height were among children whose parents controlled their fertility by stopping having children before the mother's 36th birthday. However, it does not seem that this increase in biological well-being was accompanied by major episodes of upward social mobility.

This paper explores whether a positive unexpected exogenous (unearned) wealth shock affects household structure decisions in different Spanish regions. The Christmas draw of the Spanish National Lottery is used in a natural experiment as a proxy for exogenous random variations in provincial wealth. A static and dynamic linear panel event-study design allows for control of changing economic and demographic conditions at the province level and the dynamic effects on the analyzed decisions. The evidence is consistent with families getting divorced and having children when the province in which they live experiences an unexpected increase in wealth, but no conclusive effect on wedding plans is found.

Following the most dramatic migration episode of the 21st century, Turkey hosted the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world. This paper assesses the impact of the arrival of Syrian refugees on the Turkish children's health, with a focus on height – a standard nutritional outcome. Accounting for the endogenous choice of immigrant location, our results show that Turkish children residing in provinces with a large share of refugees exhibit a significant improvement in their height as compared to those living in provinces with fewer refugees. Against other potential channels, a refugee-induced increase in maternal unemployment and the associated increase in maternal care seem to explain the observed positive effect on children's health.

We use novel survey data to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Libya. Our analysis compares the effects of the pandemic for displaced and non-displaced citizens, controlling for individual and household characteristics and geo-localized measures of economic activity and conflict intensity. In our sample, 9.5% of respondents report that a household member has been infected by COVID-19, while 24.7% of them have suffered economic damages and 14.6% have experienced negative health effects due to the pandemic. IDPs do not display higher incidence of COVID-19 relative to comparable non-displaced individuals, but are about 60% more likely to report negative economic and health impacts caused by the pandemic. We provide suggestive evidence that the larger damages suffered by IDPs can be explained by their weaker economic status—which leads to more food insecurity and indebtedness—and by the discrimination they face in accessing health care.

The starting point of our research is the inadequacy of assuming, in the construction of a model of mortality, that frailty is constant for the individuals comprising a demographic population. This assumption is implicitly made by standard life table techniques. The substantial differences in the individual susceptibility to specific causes of death lead to heterogeneity in frailty, and this can have a material effect on mortality models and projections—specifically a bias due to the underestimation of longevity improvements. Given these considerations, in order to overcome the misrepresentation of the future mortality evolution, we develop a stochastic model based on a stratification weighting mechanism, which takes into account heterogeneity in frailty. Furthermore, the stratified stochastic model has been adapted also to capture COVID-19 frailty heterogeneity, that is a frailty worsening due to the COVID-19 virus. Based on different frailty levels characterizing a population, which affect mortality differentials, the analysis allows for forecasting the temporary excess of deaths by the stratification schemes in a stochastic environment.

In multi-population mortality modeling, autoregressive moving average (ARMA) processes are typically used to model the evolution of mortality differentials between different populations over time. While such processes capture only short-term serial dependence, it is found in our empirical work that mortality differentials often exhibit statistically significant long-term serial dependence, suggesting the necessity for using long memory processes instead. In this paper, we model mortality differentials between different populations with long memory processes, while preserving coherence in the resulting mortality forecasts. Our results indicate that if the dynamics of mortality differentials are modeled by long memory processes, mean reversion would be much slower, and forecast uncertainty over the long run would be higher. These results imply that the true level of population basis risk in index-based longevity hedges may be larger than what we would expect when ARMA processes are assumed. We also study how index-based longevity hedges should be calibrated if mortality differentials follow long memory processes. It is found that delta hedges are more robust than variance-minimizing hedges, in the sense that the former remains effective even if the true processes for mortality differentials are long memory ones.

This paper provides a new market consistent approach to the valuation of no negative equity guarantees and equity release mortgages. The paper provides a new approach to the estimation of volatility inputs. The proposed approach to volatility produces a volatility term structure that is dependent on the age and gender of the borrower. Illustrative valuations are provided based on the Black ’76 put pricing formula and mortality projections based on the M5 Cairns–Blake–Dowd mortality model. Results show interesting ramifications for industry practice and prudential regulation.

Longevity risk is the risk that people on average will live longer than expected. That potential increase in life expectancy exposes corporations and pension funds to the risk of having insufficient funds to pay a more extended stream of annuity benefits. Buy-ins, buy-outs, and longevity bonds provide pension funds with insurance and financial market instruments to hedge their longevity risk. The most straightforward instruments and the most robust markets are currently for buy-ins and buy-outs. The model developed here shows that these instruments transfer value to pension holders and, other things being equal, would not be used by firms since shareholder value is reduced. The analysis, however, also shows that these instruments can be used to solve the under-investment problem created by underfunded pension plans and so increase not only the pension fund value but also the corporate stock value.

It is well-known that marital status is an important predictor for life expectancy. However, non-married individuals are often misclassified as singles which ignores the heterogeneity within the group. This paper shows the importance of distinguishing between types of singles, and in particular whether they are cohabiting, when predicting life expectancies. We use unique and detailed longitudinal register data to track marital status throughout the individual's lifetime. We find that all types of singles consistently benefit from living with a spouse, i.e., after divorce, becoming widower or being never married. This result holds for both men and women. For certain types of cohabiting singles we reject significant differences in life expectancy compared to married individuals. Finally, we use a case study to show that, like married individuals, all types of singles that cohabit also serve as informal caregivers and have the potential to limit the end-of-life long-term care expenditure levels.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that exposure to the restrictive fertility policies of the Chinese “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign in the 1970s contributes to the dynamics and patterns of elderly suicides in China in the period 2004–2017. We apply an identification strategy that exploits variation in exposure to this policy across birth cohorts that is based on the different timing of the implementation of the fertility policies across Chinese provinces. The results show that cohorts with a greater exposure to the restrictive fertility policy in the 1970s exhibit higher suicide rates during old ages.

Fertility decline in human history is a complex enigma. Different triggers have been proposed, among others the increased demand for human capital resulting in parents making a quantity–quality (QQ) trade-off. This is the first study that examines the existence of a QQ trade-off and the possible gender bias by analyzing fertility intentions rather than fertility outcomes. We rely on the unified growth theory to understand the QQ trade-off conceptually and a discrete choice experiment conducted among 426 respondents in Ethiopia to analyze fertility intentions empirically. We confirm the existence of a QQ trade-off only when the number of children is less than six and find that intentions are gendered in two ways: (i) boys are preferred over girls, and (ii) men are willing to trade-off more education in return for more children. Results imply that a focus on both stimulating intentions for education, especially girls' education, and on family size intentions is important to accelerate the demographic transition.