Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
Journal of Finance, Vol. 71, No. 2, 2016
Netspar Discussion Paper No. 05/2011-050
63 Pages Posted: 10 May 2011 Last revised: 24 Dec 2015
There are 2 versions of this paper
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
Date Written: December 23, 2016
Abstract
We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.
Keywords: Annuities, Health insurance, Life-cycle model, Life insurance, Portfolio choice
JEL Classification: D14, D91, G11, I13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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