Tax incentives, bequest motives and the demand for life insurance: evidence from Germany

Life insurance, in particular whole life insurance, plays an important role for private saving in Germany. Whole life insurance combines the insurance against uncertain death with a savings plan. Accordingly, a stylized model of life-cycle behavior would predict that whole life insurance purchases respond to both bequest motives and the tax advantages of life insurance compared with other forms of saving. Using data from the German Consumer Expenditure Survey (EVS), the paper shows that tax advantages and bequest motives indeed have an important impact on life insurance demand in Germany, if the empirical specification explicitly recognizes the censoring of life insurance face values.

Tax Incentives, Bequest Motives, and the Demand for Life Insurance: Evidence from two Natural Experiments in Germany

Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000 halved the tax exemption limit for capital income in Germany. We document that the demand for life insurance reacted strongly to this change. With regard to bequest motives, we analyze the demand for life insurance in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Relative to market-based economies, the socialist GDR can be viewed as an experimental institutional setting where life-insurance demand was not influenced by tax considerations which allows us to isolate bequest motives while controlling for life-cycle and precautionary motives. We find a significantly higher ownership probability among households with children and a high regard for the family, confirming bequest motives in life-insurance demand.savings, life insurance, capital income taxation, bequests

Semileptonic decays of the Higgs boson at the Tevatron

We examine the prospects for extending the Tevatron reach for a Standard Model Higgs boson by including the semileptonic Higgs boson decays h --> WW --> l nu jj for M_h >~ 2 M_W, and h --> W jj --> l nu jj for M_h <~ 2 M_W, where j is a hadronic jet. We employ a realistic simulation of the signal and backgrounds using the Sherpa Monte Carlo event generator. We find kinematic selections that enhance the signal over the dominant W+jets background. The resulting sensitivity could be an important addition to ongoing searches, especially in the mass range 120 <~ M_h <~ 150 GeV. The techniques described can be extended to Higgs boson searches at the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 68 pages, 19 figure

A Forward Branching Phase-Space Generator

We develop a forward branching phase-space generator for use in next-to-leading order parton level event generators. By performing 2 -> 3 branchings from a fixed jet phase-space point, all bremsstrahlung events contributing to the given jet configuration are generated. The resulting phase-space integration is three-dimensional irrespective of the considered jet multiplicity. In this first study, we use the forward branching phase-space generator to calculate in the leading-color approximation next-to-leading order corrections to fully differential gluonic jet configurations.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

NLO QCD corrections to W+ W- b anti-b production with leptonic decays in the light of top quark mass and asymmetry measurements

We present the NLO QCD corrections to the processes p p and p anti-p to W+ W- b anti-b including leptonic decays of the W bosons. Non-resonant contributions as well as diagrams with doubly resonant and singly resonant top quark propagators are fully taken into account. We employ the narrow width approximation to perform the decays of the W bosons; spin correlations are however preserved. We also calculate observables relevant for top quark mass measurements, and study the impact of kinematical requirements and different scale choices on t anti-t asymmetries.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, version submitted to and accepted by JHE