Tax Incentives, Bequest Motives, and the Demand for Life Insurance: Evidence from two Natural Experiments in Germany

Nicolas Sauter (), Jan Walliser and Joachim Winter ()

No 3040, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000 halved the tax exemption limit for capital income in Germany. We document that the demand for life insurance reacted strongly to this change. With regard to bequest motives, we analyze the demand for life insurance in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Relative to market-based economies, the socialist GDR can be viewed as an experimental institutional setting where life-insurance demand was not influenced by tax considerations which allows us to isolate bequest motives while controlling for life-cycle and precautionary motives. We find a significantly higher ownership probability among households with children and a high regard for the family, confirming bequest motives in life-insurance demand.

Keywords: savings; life insurance; capital income taxation; bequests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 D14 D91 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3040.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_3040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().