| Since the reform and opening up,with the development of Chinese economy,the per capita disposable income has been increasing,the quality of people’s life has made a qualitative leap,and the protection of health and the safety of life and property has become more and more important to people.With the support of a series of national policies and the improvement of people’s risk awareness,China’s commercial life insurance industry has been developing rapidly.At the same time,housing prices in China have been rising rapidly since the housing reform in 1998,and the increasingly high prices have a significant impact on people’s daily consumption activities.As part of the non-housing consumption of households,do rising housing prices affect the commercial life insurance consumption of households? This paper investigates the impact of house prices on urban households’ demand for commercial life insurance,enriching the research on the factors influencing the demand for commercial life insurance and providing suggestions to promote the healthy development of the commercial life insurance industry and the real estate industry in China.This paper uses China Household Financial Survey(CHFS)data for 2015,2017,and 2019 to constitute panel data spanning three years,and uses probit and ols models to study the impact of house prices on urban households’ commercial life insurance at the micro level after controlling for relevant individual characteristics of household heads,household-level demographic characteristics,household-level economic characteristics,and regional financial accessibility.The results of the benchmark regression show that the demand for commercial life insurance among urban households is affected by the increase in house prices.The results of the benchmark regression show that the increase in house prices reduces the demand for commercial life insurance of urban households at the 1% significance level.In addition,the increase in house prices has a significant crowding-out effect on households’ demand for commercial life insurance,while the suppression effect on the demand for commercial health insurance is not significant.The results of the intermediate effect analysis show that rising house prices reduce households’ demand for commercial life insurance mainly by increasing the liquidity constraint of urban households.For the heterogeneity analysis,different households may have different demands for commercial life insurance,and this paper groups households according to income,education,housing units,age and region.The empirical results show that rising house prices have the strongest inhibitory effect on the demand for commercial life insurance among middle-income households,followed by low-income households and the weakest among high-income households.House price increase significantly reduces the commercial life insurance demand of low-educated households,and has no significant effect on the commercial life insurance demand of high-educated households.Rising house prices have a greater dampening effect on the demand for commercial life insurance among middle-aged and older households than among younger households.Households with one suite are more likely to be affected by rising house prices compared to households with multiple suites.The suppressive effect of house price increase on households in the eastern and central regions is more significant than that of households in the western region.For robustness tests,this paper replaces the explanatory variables with provincial house prices for probit and OLS regressions,as well as replaces the model with a tobit model and a random effects model for regressions,and the regression results are consistent with the performance of the benchmark regression results,indicating that the conclusions of this paper are robust.To address the possible endogeneity problem,this paper uses two-stage OLS and ivprobit regressions using one-period lagged provincial house prices as the instrumental variable,and the regression results are still consistent with the benchmark regression results.Based on the findings of the empirical analysis,this paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations:(1)Regulate the real estate market,reduce consumers’ precautionary savings,and enrich investment channels.(2)Improve the real estate financial market to reduce consumers’ liquidity constraints.(3)Improve the literacy level,financial literacy and risk awareness of household heads.(4)Relieve the housing pressure of low-and middle-income families and release the demand for life insurance for low-and middle-income families.(5)Enriching life insurance varieties to meet the needs of middle-aged and elderly families for life insurance. |
PDF Full Text Request