Superstition and farmers’ life insurance spending

Yun Liu, Yifei Zhang (), Xin Chen and Yuxin Yang

Economics Letters, 2021, vol. 206, issue C

Abstract: Superstition is prevalent in rural areas, yet very few studies examine whether it affects rural households’ economic decisions. In this paper, we investigate the impact of “zodiac year” superstition on Chinese rural households’ life insurance spending. We find a statistically significant 18.5% increase in life insurance expenditure during the head’s zodiac year. Such a boost is only significant in the zodiac year and does not exist in non-zodiac years. Our study provides novel evidence that rural households would hedge “bad luck” by self-insurance when bearing superstitious beliefs.

Keywords: Superstition; Insurance; Rural household (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 G52 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176521002524
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:206:y:2021:i:c:s0165176521002524

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109975

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().