Life-cycle consumption and life insurance: Empirical evidence from Italian Survey

Fabrizio Striani

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2023, vol. 619, issue C

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically if the purchase of the life insurance improves the life-cycle consumption profile of Italian households. Starting from the Yaari life-cycle model in the presence of voluntary bequest and term life insurance that cannot be resold in the context of life expectancy uncertainty and, using the CRRA (Constant Relative Risk Aversion) utility function, we obtain two testable Euler equations, one in the case of no insurance and the other with insurance. Then, we elaborate a panel using the data collected from the site of the Bank of Italy and refer to “Indagine sui Bilanci delle Famiglie Italiane, 1977–2016” and we test, empirically, if the insurance policy does, indeed, improve the consumption profile. Adopting as estimator the GMM-sys, we obtain that the life insurance purchase generates a positive effect on the Italian household consumption and, in light of this result, we discuss the motivations whereby only 54% of households in the sample decide to take out an insurance policy.

Keywords: Life-cycle model; CRRA utility function; Insurance policy; Panel analysis; GMM system methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:619:y:2023:i:c:s0378437123002741

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2023.128719

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