Life Insurance, Natural Disasters, and Human Capital Investment: A Case of Early 20th Century Japan

Tetsuji Okazaki, Toshihiro Okubo and Eric Strobl

No 25-010E, CIGS Working Paper Series from The Canon Institute for Global Studies

Abstract: This paper examines the role of life insurance buffering negative income shocks on schooling. We focus on middle school grade promotion rates under earthquake disasters in early 20th century Japan. We constructed a dataset on grade promotions by gender, life insurance claims, and information on the deadliness of earthquakes, at the prefecture-level. The results of mediation analyses indicate that life insurance significantly buffered the negative impact of earthquakes on the promotion of boys to higher grades, while for girls the buffering effect of life insurance was mostly small and insignificant, which is consistent with the theoretical prediction.

Pages: 34
Date: 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cigs.canon/en/uploads/2025/04/WP25-010E_250326_okazaki.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:cnn:wpaper:25-010e

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIGS Working Paper Series from The Canon Institute for Global Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The Canon Institute for Global Studies ().