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

Tetsuji Okazaki, Toshihiro Okubo and Eric Strobl
Additional contact information
Tetsuji Okazaki: The Faculty of Economics, Meiji Gakuin University, The Cann Institte for Global Studies (CIGS), and The University of Tokyo
Toshihiro Okubo: Faculty of Economics, Keio University
Eric Strobl: Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Bern

No CIRJE-F-1246, CIRJE F-Series from CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo

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

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/dp/2025/2025cf1246.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:tky:fseres:2025cf1246

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIRJE F-Series from CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CIRJE administrative office ().