The adequacy of life insurance: evidence from the health and retirement survey

B. Douglas Bernheim (), Lorenzo Forni (), Jagadeesh Gokhale and Laurence Kotlikoff ()

No 9914, Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: This study examines life insurance adequacy among married American couples approaching retirement based on the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey with matched Social Security earnings histories. It evaluates each household's life insurance needs based on new financial planning software that embodies a life-cycle-planning model and covers a broad array of demographic, economic, and financial characteristics. A sizable minority of households are significantly underinsured. Almost one third of wives and over 10 percent of husbands would have suffered living-standard reductions greater than 20 percent had their spouses died in 1992.

Keywords: Insurance; Life insurance companies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias
Date: 1999
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/workpaper/1999/Wp9914.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Adequacy of Life Insurance: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey (1999)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwp:9914

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diane Rosenberger ().