IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/apeclt/v31y2024i19p1946-1953.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does childhood traumatic experience affect household life insurance demand in middle and older ages? Evidence from the 1959-1961 Great Chinese Famine

Author

Listed:
  • Xiangwen Zheng
  • Xiaolin Li
  • Shikun Qin

Abstract

Childhood unexpected trauma casts a lifelong shadow on subsequent financial behaviours. The existing literature has mainly investigated stock or bond market participation, and few scholars focus on insurance decisions. Our paper enriches previous studies by testing the impact of childhood famine exposure on household life insurance demand in middle and older age groups. Using CHARLS, we discover that householders exposed to the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine as children were more inclined to own life insurance policies and pay higher premiums. Specifically, respondents who experienced the famine between 0–2 or 7–17 years old highly promoted their life insurance demand, whereas no statistically significant effects were observed for preschool famine experience. Additionally, women and people with three or more children were more likely to be influenced by the famine. Finally, risk and time preference were effective mediation factors, both channelling around 5% of the relationship.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiangwen Zheng & Xiaolin Li & Shikun Qin, 2024. "Does childhood traumatic experience affect household life insurance demand in middle and older ages? Evidence from the 1959-1961 Great Chinese Famine," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(19), pages 1946-1953, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:31:y:2024:i:19:p:1946-1953
    DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2208830
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2023.2208830
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13504851.2023.2208830?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:31:y:2024:i:19:p:1946-1953. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEL20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.