Insurance demand: a historical long-run perspective (1850–2020)

Sebastian Kohl () and Matthias Römer ()
Additional contact information
Sebastian Kohl: Freie Universität Berlin
Matthias Römer: Freie Universität Berlin

The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice, 2025, vol. 50, issue 3, No 7, 595-618

Abstract: Abstract Existing research on how international insurance demand varies with income is largely driven by cross-sectional variation post-1970. Drawing on newly collected historical long-run data on life insurance premiums starting as early as 1850 to 2020 for 20 OECD countries, we evaluate the ‘S-Curve’ predicting insurance demand as each country transitions through different income levels. In contrast to predictions in the literature, we reject the ‘S-curve’, but identify a two-bump curve with two high-elasticity episodes, one driven by a massive expansion of life insurance contracts at the end of the 19th century to ensure mortality risks and the other in the late 20th century driven by a shift to savings products. This could imply that the longitudinal catching-up process of countries with low insurance density may be steeper than what the cross-sectional ‘S-Curve’ would suggest.

Keywords: Insurance demand; Life insurance S-curve; Historical-comparative research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41288-024-00339-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:gpprii:v:50:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1057_s41288-024-00339-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/finance/journal/41288/PS2

DOI: 10.1057/s41288-024-00339-8

Access Statistics for this article

The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice is currently edited by Christophe Courbage

More articles in The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice from Palgrave Macmillan, The Geneva Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().