Replication package for:
“Commitment versus Flexibility and Sticky Prices: Evidence from Life Insurance”
Authors: Radoslaw Paluszynski and Pei Cheng Yu
Forthcoming at Review of Economic Dynamics

1. Overview

This replication package consists of the data part (performed in Stata), the computation part (performed in Fortran with MPI), and the plotting part (performed in Gnuplot). Because the data is proprietary, company names are replaced by a numeric id variable.

2. Computational requirements

The exact results presented in the paper are obtained with the following specifications:
- Dual Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2697 v4 (18C, 2.3GHz, 3.6GHz Turbo, 2400MHz, 45MB, 145W)
- Stata/SE 15.1 for Unix
- Intel Fortran 90 on Linux (ifort 2021.4.0)
- Intel(R) MPI Library for Linux* OS, Version 2021.4
- Gnuplot 5.0 patchlevel 3 on Linux

3. Replicating the results

 i. Data folder (runtime is negligible for all codes):
  - run cost.do to generate Figure 3.
  - run empirical_results.do to generate Tables 2, 6-8, 10-12, and Figures 2, 10-13
  - run compare_30_40.do to generate the bottom panel of Table 5, Tables 13-14, and Figure 14
  - run annuities.do to generate Table 9
  - run spf_plots.do to generate Figure 15
  
 ii. Fortran folder:
  - run the code in subfolder Fortran to replicate Table 5 and Figures 9-11. The provided makefile contains the compilation and execution commands. This code takes about 2 minutes to run on 36 cores.

 iii. Plots folder:
  - use the following command in subfolder Plots to generate Figures 7-9 (must run the Fortran code first):
for arg in $(ls plot*txt); do gnuplot < $arg; done