Abstract Despite its potential to protect vulnerable households, demand for index insurance remains low. One explanation is product framing: in pastoralist settings, index insurance is typically marketed as “livestock insurance,” framing it around a specific asset rather than around household consumption. We test whether reframing insurance around household welfare increases demand, using a lab-in-the-field experiment with 287 couples in Northern Kenya. Participants exposed to a “family framing” that describes payouts as funds for household expenses allocated about 22% more of their budget to insurance (1.1 percentage points from a baseline of about 5%) than those exposed to the standard livestock framing. Because each spouse makes their own decisions, we observe both partners within the couple, and the family framing raises demand for both husbands and wives. The results suggest that how insurance is presented can affect demand.
Low-income individuals allocate a significant share of their income to informal risk management mechanisms. In Brazil, the Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) is one of the most successful cash transfer programmes globally. Most of its beneficiaries are women. Nevertheless, the PBF does not provide protection against the risk of death. In light of this context, we conducted an exploratory analysis to assess the potential affordability of an inclusive life insurance policy for PBF beneficiaries. Various scenarios were developed considering factors such as age, insurance expenditures, and safety margins. Annual premiums vary from BRL 56.27 to BRL 225.10, while the insured amounts range from BRL 2,295 to BRL 179,322. This inclusive insurance could offer coverage equivalent to 0.09 to 13.37 years of the beneficiary’s average monthly income. This insurance has the potential to address the protection needs of this population whilst respecting their financial constraints and aligning with public policies aimed at poverty reduction.
In many health insurance markets, consumers can only choose between contracts with a duration of one year. However, offering health insurance contracts with a longer duration could provide significant benefits for consumers, health insurers, and health care providers. We investigate consumer preferences for multiple-year health insurance contracts in a market with regulated competition using a labelled discrete choice experiment. Specifically, we examine how consumer preferences vary based on the attributes of the contract (provider choice, preventive care, waiting list mediation, and premium) and several characteristics of the respondents. We surveyed 894 Dutch consumers between 18 to 91 years old, who made 12 choices between 1- and 3-year basic health insurance contracts. Mixed logit model analysis and choice share simulations show that a significant percentage of the respondents would be willing to opt for a 3-year basic health insurance contract. The choice for 3-year contracts is strongly influenced by the premium. Provider choice, waiting list mediation, and – to a lesser extent – preventive care also play an important role. The insights are helpful for policy decisions to potentially support the offering of multiple-year health insurance contracts and how these contracts could then best be designed in health insurance markets with regulated competition.
Affiliated reinsurance helps insurers diversify underwriting risks, expand capacity and manage capital. Where counterparties of the reinsurance are affiliated to the cedent, the disclosure of such reinsurance is limited. Thus, the fairness of pricing and the genuineness of risk transfer are hard to verify, which weaken capital supervision and amplify financial fragility. Using insurer-level data for 2010–2022, we measure asset-side systemic vulnerability with a common-asset network model and exploit China’s 2015 Circular on the disclosure of insurers’ affiliated reinsurance transactions as a quasi-natural experiment. Insurers with greater ex ante reliance on reinsurance experienced a relative decline in systemic vulnerability after the Circular, and the association is more pronounced among foreign-owned and property-casualty insurers. The estimated decline is modest in magnitude, amounting to about 0.09 of a standard deviation of systemic vulnerability per standard deviation of ex ante exposure, and is concentrated in the year of implementation and the year that follows. Further analysis traces an asset-side de-risking path: affected insurers increased bond holdings, reduced opaque residual assets, lowered leverage, and became less crowded relative to peers.
