Employment Rank and the Choice of Health Insurance Benefit Scheme among Bangladeshi Civil Servants

This study surveys 622 Bangladeshi civil servants of all administrative jurisdictions and elicits their preference for health insurance schemes. The latter vary in the amount of sum assured as well as in terms of premium sharing rules with the government. The paper also explores the financial burden that the premium subsidy may impose on the exchequer and the state’s fiscal capacity to shoulder it. We discover a very high willingness to join the scheme. Though all three premium-sharing options posit flat rates common for all employment ranks, respondents appear to prefer premiums proportional to their basic salary.

A collective investment problem in a stochastic volatility environment: The impact of sharing rules

It is typical in collectively administered pension funds that employees delegate fund managers to invest their contributions. In addition, many pension funds still need to sustain guarantees (prescribed by law) in spite of the current low interest environment. In this paper, we consider an optimal collective investment problem for a pool of investors who (implicitly) demand minimum guarantees by deriving utility from the wealth exceeding their guarantees in two financial market settings, one with a stochastic and one with a constant volatility. We find that individual investors’ well-being will not be worsened through the collective investment in both financial markets, as individual optimal solutions are attainable if a financially fair state-dependent sharing rule is applied. When more prevailing sharing rules like linear rules are applied, this holds no longer. Furthermore, the degree of sub-optimality imposed by linear sharing rules is more pronounced in the stochastic volatility market than in the constant volatility market.

Negotiating weights for burden sharing rules in international climate negotiations: an empirical analysis

We have collected data from a world-wide survey among COP delegates to empirically investigate preferences for certain burden sharing rules among key groups in a setting that reflects the possibility of observing concessions from negotiating partners. In our survey, the participants had the opportunity to select and combine up to eight (pre-defined) burden sharing rules and to assign relative weights to the selected rules in their preferred bundle. We examine whether such a mechanism helps to overcome the currently strictly (self-interested) strategic claims on equity in the negotiation process. We observe that delegates from different groups of countries show a general willingness for concessions. However, the degree to which different burden sharing rules are taken into consideration partly differs between countries. As a key insight we report that the individual assessment of the polluter-pays rule based on current emissions does not only stress the persistence of the traditional Annex-B/Non-Annex-B division but also suggests tendencies for a more fragmented grouping with different positions between, for example, delegates from developing countries (i.e. G77 members) and emerging countries (i.e. BASIC). At the same time, we observe tendencies for a more harmonized view among key groups towards the ability-to-pay rule in a setting of weighted burden sharing rules.