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.

View research
Download PDF

Citation

Koijen, Ralph, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Motohiro Yogo. "Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice." The Journal of Finance 71, no. 2 (April 2016): 957-1010.

Each author name for a Columbia Business School faculty member is linked to a faculty research page, which lists additional publications by that faculty member.

Each topic is linked to an index of publications on that topic.