Search Results
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
We study the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. A principal insures an agent whose private type follows an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, it also backloads high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his reports increases without bound. These results extend—and help elucidate the limits of—the hallmark ...
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
We study the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. A principal insures an agent whose private type follows an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, it also backloads high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his reports increases without bound. These results extend—and help elucidate the limits of—the hallmark ...
Working Paper
Extended Supplement to “Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information”
This supplement contains auxiliary technical results and proofs omitted from Bloedel, Krishna, and Leukhina (2025) (henceforth BKL) and its Supplemental Appendix (henceforth SA). First, Section I proves parts (a)–(c) and (e)–(f) of Theorem 3 from Appendix B.1 of BKL. (Part (d) of Theorem 3 is proved in SA-E.1 of BKL.) Second, Section J proves Proposition 3.2 from Section 3.3 of BKL and Lemma B.2 from Appendix B.2 of BKL. Finally, Section K proves supporting facts for Properties (a)–(e) from Section 5.2 of BKL. Throughout, we follow the numbering and labeling conventions from BKL and its ...