Abstract
This research investigates life and health (LH) insurance consumption by exploiting the significant regional differences in socio-economic, demographic, and environmental factors in China. This paper further decomposes LH insurance consumption into three types: protection, investment, and health products. We find that changes in demographic conditions associated with the one-child policy, the urbanisation process, an ageing population and imbalanced dependency ratio are significantly related to the consumption of LH insurance, and environmental degradation risk is significantly related to the consumption of health insurance. The empirical results also suggest that insurers’ characteristics and pricing strategies are additional important determinants of LH insurance consumption.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 67-101 |
| Number of pages | 35 |
| Journal | The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 14 May 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2019 |
Funding
We benefitted from discussions and comments by Bingzheng Chen, Michael R. Powers, and Mary A. Weiss, and from seminar participants at the 2014 IRFRC Singapore meeting, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Tsinghua University. Thanks are also due to the editor and two anonymous referees of the Journal. Jiang Cheng gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 71573164]. All errors are ours.
Keywords
- Demographic conditions
- Environmental degradation
- Life and health insurance consumption