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Selling the Future
In Selling the Future
, Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in
Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to
commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the
start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II,
Moran describes insurance companies and government officials
working together to create a picture of the future as precarious
and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to
deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry
administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled
them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through
insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means
to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises.
Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology
within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for
responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to
normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as
essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle
for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing
bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of
disciplining workers into a capitalist system.
eBook
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.
Journal Article
Questions and answers on life insurance : the life insurance toolbook
\"Need help facing the constant barrage of information from competing life insurance companies? With twenty years of experience in the life insurance business, Tony Steuer delivers a practical, one-of-a-kind resource for choosing the best life insurance policy for you or your family. Using a simple question-and-answer format Steuer covers the essential basics and the finer points of life insurance including how to: differentiate between types of policies, find and evaluate a policy and company, hire a trusted agent, understand the practice of underwriting, monitor a policy's performance.\"--Back cover.
Book
UNDERSTANDING THE ADVICE OF COMMISSIONS-MOTIVATED AGENTS
We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate the quality of advice provided by life insurance agents in India. Agents overwhelmingly recommend unsuitable, strictly dominated products that provide high commissions to the agent. Agents cater to the beliefs of uninformed consumers, even when those beliefs are wrong. We also find that agents appear to focus on maximizing the amount of premiums (and therefore their commissions) that customers pay, as opposed to focusing on how much insurance coverage customers need. A natural experiment requiring disclosure of commissions for a specific product results in agents recommending alternative products with high commissions but no disclosure requirement. A follow-up agent survey sheds light on the extent to which poor advice reflects both the commission incentives and agents’ limited product knowledge.
Journal Article
The Cost of Financial Frictions for Life Insurers
During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as—19 percent for annuities and — 57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions, interacting with statutory reserve regulation that allowed life insurers to record far less than a dollar of reserve per dollar of future insurance liability. We identify the shadow cost of capital through exogenous variation in required reserves across different types of policies. The shadow cost was $0.96 per dollar of statutory capital for the average company in November 2008.
Journal Article
Regulated Lives
Regulated Lives explores the British life insurance industry's changing assessments of the values and risks of human life between 1800 and 1914. Timothy Alborn's unique study uses insurance practices to demonstrate how Victorian ideas about the lived experience altered both to accommodate and resist elements of modernity such as statistical thinking, medicalization, and capitalist bureaucracy.
The nature of Victorian life insurance companies meant that their customers were both consuming subjects and objectified abstractions. Policyholders were active consumers of a product as well as passive objects which were evaluated for 'risk' in the objective and homogenizing terms determined by the industry. By examining how salesmen, actuaries, and doctors utilized their differing conceptions of what the various aspects of people's lives meant, Regulated Lives suggests that the very complexity of modern commercial and social institutions produces space where individuality can flourish.
eBook