Report
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
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: lifecycle models; Health insurance; Annuities; Portfolio choice; Life insurance;
JEL Classification: I13; D91; G11; D14;
Access Documents
File(s):
File format is application/pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr499.pdf
Description: Full text
Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Part of Series: Staff Report
Publication Date: 2014-06-11
Number: 499
Pages: 62 pages