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Beyond death: The impact of a population-wide health shock on life insurance

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  • Cheng, Chunli

Abstract

Population-wide health shocks, for example, pandemics, affect life insurance owners beyond their health impact. This paper considers joint impacts of their surrender behavior adaptions and mortality rise following a population-wide health shock on insurance pricing. We build a model that captures both more surrenders of contracts to meet unexpected liquidity needs and less financially beneficial surrenders to keep insurance protection after the shock. Unlike the systemic mortality rise impact that turns out to be negligible, we find that policyholders’ surrender behavior adaptions substantially devalue policies with increasing emergency surrenders being the main driver. Regulatory solvency protection partly restrains the devaluation.

Suggested Citation

  • Cheng, Chunli, 2022. "Beyond death: The impact of a population-wide health shock on life insurance," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:63:y:2022:i:c:s1062940822001589
    DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2022.101823
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Systemic mortality rise; Surrender behavior adaptions; Bounded rationality; Insurance regulation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation

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